The cure lies in
the power of a prophet in Israel. The prophet is unnamed, but we know who it is
because we have already been reading about the miracles of Elisha in chapter 4:
he causes the widow’s oil lasted longer than it should have, he raises the Shunammite
woman’s son, he purifies some poison stew, and he feeds 100 people with very
little food, we the readers have no problem believing that Elisha can cure
Naaman’s leprosy.
But there is
this one little problem. Israel and Syria do not have a good relationship, if
you turn over to chapter 6 you find that Syria and Israel are at war. How in
the world will a commander of the army of Syria (Aram), march into Israel and
ask for healing? He does it with dignity and pomp and circumstance and lots of
money, like any VIP would do. Surely the king of Israel won’t turn down a load
of money. 10 talents of silver A talent could weigh anything from 50-80 lbs and
silver today is worth about $225 a pound. 6,000 shekels of gold would be 150
lbs of gold, gold is worth about $400 a pound today, and 10 changes of clothes
in a day when most people wore their clothes until they rotted off of them. But
the king of Israel takes it as a trick.
Meanwhile Elisha
knows what is going on and sends a servant and says to send Naaman to him that
‘he may learn there is a prophet in Israel’. What does the VIP expect when his
chariot and his entourage stops at Elisha’s door? The red carpet? Flashing
paparazzi photography? Of course. After all this is the treatment that
commanders receive. Instead he gets nothing but a servant, possibly a slave to
deliver the healer’s message: go dip in the Jordan river seven times. And he
has a righteous fit. I’ve tried to think of a similar situation and what I
thought of was Donald Trump with all his money arriving at a tribal shaman’s
house asking for a cure. It looks this ridiculous. And then for the healer to
send a servant? That is dishonourable. This means the prophet is not even
giving him the time of day to see him. This is when you have stage 4 cancer and
your oncologist sends a medical assistant to give his or her orders, and you
never see the doctor. But his servants see the heart of the problem. It’s just
too easy. If it was difficult, would you
have done it? Of course you must give a difficult task to a hero in order to
make the story sell. Perhaps he will kill a giant with nothing but a slingshot,
or take on the 12 tasks of Hercules that
start with killing a lion, and killing the nine headed dragon… Perhaps he will
have to fly a fight plane through a trench and make a precise shot to destroy
the death star, or take the one ring and throw it in the fire of mount doom, At
very very least he should have to lift a heavy hammer and defeat his evil
brother.
Naaman hoped for such a task, instead he is
told to dip in a dirty river. Talk about anticlimactic! For instance: would the
so called Oklahoma river-that we know is really the Canadian make you clean?
No, it might give you Ecoli. And everyone knows that Syrian’s rivers are much
better than Israel’s little stream called the Jordan. His servants persuade
him, just as the servant girl persuaded him to try this in the first place. He
is clean, he is cured, he rejoices and wants to worship the God of Israel, which
shows not only is he physically healed but spiritually as well. Elisha won’t
take payment and Naaman wants dirt, probably because he believed that gods were
geographically located and if he had Israel’s soil perhaps Israel’s god would
give him favour. But there is a subtle message in the fact that he brought with
him gold and silver and took back dirt.
In the story of
Naaman, God has turned everything upside down. Social conventions, status quo,
the responsibility of kings and governments, and in the midst of this we even
ask ourselves the question of who has the right to health care? The story is
even more topsy turvy for us, because a Syrian is a powerful man and the
Syrians we know are now refugees wondering the earth. But this story addresses
the issue of the nobody as the Syrians wander the earth. Who had the power in
this story? Well God of course, but who has the voice of God, the authority?
The servants. God’s cure is given in grace, not with difficult tasks to
complete. And God has absolutely no respect for the boundaries, geographical,
social, political, and economic that we humans erect.
Surely, the boundaries that we place around God’s love
cannot and will not hold God back.
Jesus refers to
this story in Luke 4 when he addresses the synagogue in his hometown
Luke 4
“Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. 25 I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in
Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a
severe famine throughout the land. 26 Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in
Zarephath in the region of Sidon. 27 And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not
one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.” 28 All the people
in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. 29 They
got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in
order to throw him off the cliff. 30 But he walked right through the crowd and
went on his way.
Is it any wonder they wanted to throw him off the cliff?
