Hoisted by his own petard

I won’t apologise for this. You need to read this chapter in its entirety too.

So the king and Haman went to dinner with Queen Esther. At this second dinner, while they were drinking wine the king again asked, “Queen Esther, what would you like? Half of my kingdom! Just ask and it’s yours.”

Queen Esther answered, “If I have found favor in your eyes, O King, and if it please the king, give me my life, and give my people their lives. We’ve been sold, I and my people, to be destroyed—sold to be massacred, eliminated. If we had just been sold off into slavery, I wouldn’t even have brought it up; our troubles wouldn’t have been worth bothering the king over.”

King Xerxes exploded, “Who? Where is he? This is monstrous!”

“An enemy. An adversary. This evil Haman,” said Esther.

Haman was terror-stricken before the king and queen.

The king, raging, left his wine and stalked out into the palace garden.

Haman stood there pleading with Queen Esther for his life—he could see that the king was finished with him and that he was doomed. As the king came back from the palace garden into the banquet hall, Haman was grovelling at the couch on which Esther reclined. The king roared out, “Will he even molest the queen while I’m just around the corner?”

When that word left the king’s mouth, all the blood drained from Haman’s face.

Harbona, one of the eunuchs attending the king, spoke up: “Look over there! There’s the gallows that Haman had built for Mordecai, who saved the king’s life. It’s right next to Haman’s house—seventy-five feet high!”

The king said, “Hang him on it!”

So Haman was hanged on the very gallows that he had built for Mordecai. And the king’s hot anger cooled.   Esther 7

How amazing is that?!?

‘Hoisted by his own petard.’ One of Andy’s favourite sayings that makes an appearance in conversation every now and then.

It’s a Shakesperean phrase with a French origin. A petard was a small bomb that was used to destroy gates and walls (peter means ‘to fart’). If you weren’t careful enough or quick enough, you could get seriously injured by the back blast and thrown up into the air. And so the phrase came to mean any situation in which you get hurt by a plan or action that you take that is intended to hurt someone else.

Which is exactly what happens to Haman of course. He is executed on the very pole that he had raised and intended for Mordecai. This concept is used in TV and film, when an evil villain creates a deadly machine for example and is then killed by it themselves. Or an evil plan backfires and kills the perpetrators. Or a prankster is injured accidentally setting off his own trap.

So we see it in the Bible and in literature and film, but how about in real life? Well, we see it with politicians all the time, of course. They are outspoken and immovable on a certain issue and then a couple of years later, have taken the opposite stance – and we have the footage to prove it. Or a politician stands strongly for honesty and transparency and then is caught being less than transparent with their expenses. Or the church in America holds Miley Cyrus up as the poster girl from a nice Christian family with nice Christian values…..until she rebels and behaves nothing like the nice Christian girl everyone knew and loved.

So that’s celebrity life, but how about our real lives?

I’m sure we’ve all witnessed or been involved in schemes that have backfired. Where the perpetrator of the cunning plan has been the one who has ended up being exposed, humiliated, hurt. One of the universal truths of life is that pretty much everything we do comes back to bite us on the bum in the end. Consequences are an inescapable reality of life.

But to be honest, there’s a deeper issue here. Because every time we wish someone ill, we are affected. Every time we say something mean, we are affected. Every time we seek revenge, we are affected. Every time we do something to hurt someone else, we are affected.

Being unkind and vengeful and spiteful and unloving always backfires. It always leaves a residue. We never walk away unscathed or unchanged. People who do unkind things become unkind people. People who do spiteful things become spiteful people.

Whatever we do to dehumanise someone else, dehumanises us.

Whatever we do to negatively affect someone else’s life, negatively affects our own.

Whatever we do to hurt someone else, hurts us.

So I’ll leave you with this image. Every time an individual fires a gun at someone, there is a gun residue left on the hand of that individual. And every time you or I take a pop at someone, there is a residue left on our heart.