Just a Pretty Face? One Night with the King

Confirmation class ended a few days early this school year; no snow days for school and no sick days for me. Time to show a movie…

I picked one I’d used with the High School Youth Group years before; Michael O. Sajbel’s 2006 One Night with the King.

One Night is based on a Biblical book and on a teaching that I just love! The teaching is called “vocation” the book goes by the name “Esther”.

You probably know what “vocation” is…sort of. Let me try to explain by asking this question: “What good, what value, is a pretty face?”

Because that’s all Esther is to King Xerxes; she’s just a pretty face. He deposed his former queen for insubordination. Esther is chosen as her replacement after a “kingdom-wide” search.

Pretty faces from all over the Persian Empire are rounded up. The women are given beauty treatments, even lessons on how best to please Xerxes; and each lady gets a shot. Each pretty face gets “one night with the king.”

But Esther brought the contest to a screeching halt. Xerxes was done. In her he had found his new queen.

The king loved Esther more than all the women, and she won grace and favor in his sight more than all the virgins, so that he set the royal crown on her head and made her queen instead of Vashti. -Esther 2:17

But that’s not the happy ending. The book still has eight chapters left, God’s just got His gal in the place where He wants her, and I don’t want to tell you so much that you won’t want to read the book…

Suffice it to say that a series of exchanges take place between her uncle and between a high-ranking anti-Semite (Haman by name). Haman plots to kill her uncle and all Jews just for good measure.

Now that date is fast approaching. All Jews are scheduled to be slaughtered. Esther’s uncle warns her that even queens are included.

But what can she do? She’s just a pretty face. It’s not as if Xerxes chose her for her foreign policy. It’s not as if he’s even going to ask her advice. Persian queens were to be seen and seen some more. Eye candy. Nothing else.

But there’s more to Esther than meets the eye! She’s a child of God!! A daughter of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; and she is no fool. Xerxes may see nothing in her but what he sees on the outside, fine! If all she is to him is the prettiest face then she’ll play that trump card for her people.

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What a great story on vocation; on using the gifts and abilities and blessings God has given to us to love Him and love our neighbor. With death fast approaching and no one is able to even get an audience with the king, Esther’s God-given beauty and brains are used to rescue her people. She won that beauty contest for such a time as this. (Read the book!)

Many of us can see the talents and gifts God’s given to other people; it’s often harder to recognize what He’s given to us. Young Christians often lament; “nothing I do matters or is important.” The Bible’s teaching on vocation reminds us that God gives us all different gifts to be used to love our neighbors. You’re not just a pretty face, strong back, or even average person. Your talents, your interests, your abilities are God-given for God’s people and more likely than not, you already are using them.

Now let me tell you some of what you’ll see in the movie; One Night with the King…

Sajbel blends a fair amount of artistic license with Scripture and with history. It is true that Xerxes’ father, Darius the Mede, was killed in war with the Greeks and it is true that Xerxes also waged war against the Greeks. It is not true that Queen Vashti refused to make an appearance at Xerxes’ party because she was protesting the war. Sajbel’s very modern Vashti wants the government to spend more money on education and public good.

(Are the dates for filming and release of One Night only a coincidence? America had been hunting Osama Bin Laden for five years, our “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq had been anything but accomplished, and President Bush had just been reelected.)

Where Sajbel’s Vashti is very enlightened on social issues, his Xerxes is very conflicted, torn between spending money at home for the public good and between avenging his father. Many of his advisors are pushing him to do the latter in hopes of a coup d’etat.

Besides being conflicted, Sajbel’s Xerxes is interested in more than a girl’s looks. This is not the weird deviant Xerxes of Zack Snyder’s 2006 film 300. This Xerxes is most women’s dream; he loves Esther for her mind, not her looks. While Scripture and history are silent on this particular aspect; we do know Vashti was deposed for failing to cavort in front of a drunken crowd, we do know that the criteria for the next queen were her looks and her ability to please the king when her one night finally came. You can hold your own opinions about whether Xerxes loved Esther for her mind.

And now the archenemy Haman. Yes, Haman wanted all Jews dead, but the reason is his hatred for Esther’s uncle. Sajbel gives Haman a family crest strikingly similar to a Nazi swastika while Haman preaches sermons of hatred and suspicion for Jews and Greeks. Greeks because of their democratic ideals and Jews because they seek to have no other gods.

One Night does a decent job of connecting the two, making both the common enemy of Persia because neither group would submit completely to an earthly king. Don’t forget though, the connection is false no matter who clever it is.

Still, I like films like this, especially for youth groups and confirmation classes. Here’s a group of Christians who know their Bible’s better than most. A lot of fun can be had—and a lot of learning too—by taking a film like this and talking about the differences. Why do you think the director made Haman a Nazi? How do we know Vashti wasn’t a peace-protestor? If you were directing, how might you have explained Xerxes’ desire to return to war?

Questions like these can break the ice for the larger and more important ones. Questions like: How did the world see Esther? How did God see her? How does the world see you? How does God? While He was perfectly capable of saving the Jews in a miraculous way, why might He have used Esther? Does He work in that way today? How might Esther’s faith, coupled with Xerxes love for her, have affected him?

So if you have a chance, take a look at Michael O. Sajbel’s One Night with the King. It’s a decent film (no skin, language, etc.) that should provide lots of material for discussion. More importantly, open your Bible and have a read of Esther to see how God uses pretty faces and the rest of us to serve and protect each other.