2 Kg 5:1-14

8 July 2001

 

"According to the Word"

 

One of my favorite things about the Bible is its frequent use of humor.  Humor can be a very effective way of getting across a message!  And besides that, having no sense of humor myself, I need all the help I can get!  So accordingly, one of my favorite humorous stories is today's Old Testament reading, the healing of Naaman.

You're no doubt saying to yourself, "Hey!  I didn't hear any laughing when that story was read a few minutes ago!  What's so funny?"  Well, just stay with me, and maybe you'll see what I mean.

It's important to understand that Naaman, commander of the Aramean king's army, is the enemy of Israel.  And as such, he's a prime target for the kind of sarcasm that often appears in scripture.  To begin with, while verse 1 acknowledges that Naaman is "a great man and in high favor with his master," the king, it also adds this comment:  "The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy."  Considering cultural attitudes toward the disease, with lepers often seen as cursed by God, "a mighty warrior with leprosy" is almost a contradiction in terms.

But Naaman's portrayal gets worse.  If it weren't for a lowly Israelite slave girl, seized during a military raid, Naaman probably would never have heard how he could be cured.  He probably would never have heard of Elisha, a prophet from among the very people he had made it his career to fight—and defeat.

Naaman isn't the only object of scorn in the story.  The Israelite king, Jehoram, the wicked son of a wicked father, King Ahab, is also portrayed in an unflattering way.  When he gets word that the king of Aram seeks healing for Naaman, Jehoram assumes the worst.  He tears his clothes, a sign of mourning and distress, and claims that this is simply a pretext for picking a fight.  When Elisha hears about it, he sends a message to the king, reminding him "that there is a prophet in Israel" (v. 8).  He basically says, "Why are you getting so worked up?  Just send him to me¼and I'll handle it!"

Having received Elisha's address, Naaman shows up at the front door.  A messenger comes out and tells the commander to go dunk himself seven times in the Jordan River, and he'll be healed.  Naaman is furious.  "Doesn't he know who I am?  Why doesn't he come out and perform some kind of¼ceremony?  How dare he send a servant!  And besides, what's so special about that mud puddle these Israelites call a river?  Let's go back to Damascus; I'll show him some real rivers!"

After Naaman finishes venting his rage, his servants speak with him, appealing to his pride.  "If the prophet had given you some great challenge, you would have done it, wouldn't you?  Well, why not do this easy thing?"  So they go to the Jordan, and lo and behold, after seven dunks in the water, Naaman is healed.

Our scripture reading stops at verse 14.  If we continue in chapter 5, we see that Naaman swallows his pride and returns to give glory to the God of Israel.  As it turns out, Gehazi, the servant of Elisha, is too greedy for his own good, and by the end of the story, he's the one with leprosy.

As I said at the beginning, humor is often used in the Bible.  (And I realize that you still may not see anything funny about this story!)  But I want to shift our focus.  The point of the story, as I see it, isn't some magical property of the Jordan River.  That's not why Naaman gets healed.  The reason is found in verse 14, when Naaman "went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God."  According to the word of Elisha, the spokesman of God.

Naaman is healed because he obeys the word of God.  For him, the word of God comes through a prophet.  But it’s not like the prophet adds anything or gives any power to that word.  There’s more than one reason for Elisha’s lack of a big display for Naaman—why he stays inside the house.  It’s not simply a way of scolding Naaman for his arrogance, but more directly for his benefit, it lets Naaman know that he’s really dealing with God, not with a human.

Of course, the word of God comes to us in other ways than through the mouth of a prophet.  There is the written word, the scriptures.  The word of God comes to us through the human words of the Bible.  And there is the living word, Jesus Christ.  The word of God has come to us through a human being, the “Son of Man,” as Jesus called himself.  This is my focus:  the word, be it comic or tragic, enraging or inspiring.

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me."  We've all heard that one!  But I wonder, is there anyone who really believes it?  Is there anyone who doesn't know that words are capable of much more damage than a broken bone?  Words can hurt.  One of my most painful moments came in college, after hearing from a girl, on whom I had an incredible crush, the dreaded words:  "I just want to be friends."  (Okay, you can take the icepick out of my heart, now!)

Seriously, though, words do make a difference.  And what we believe makes a difference.  It doesn't always seem that way at the time, but what we believe does affect what we do.  It's just that sometimes we're not sure what we believe!

Here's another one for you:  theology matters.  We often think of theology as something disconnected from our lives, as something floating around in the air, or maybe confined to dusty old books sitting on library shelves.  But theology is what we believe about God.  "Theology" comes from two Greek words:  theos (God) and logos (word), literally, "words about God."  We all have a theology, even if we've never bothered to examine it.  Our words about God, even if they're unknown to us, have power.  They affect us.

I'll use as an example someone I've mentioned before, Thomas Merton, who spent the last twenty seven years of his life at a monastery in Kentucky.  In his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton describes the impact a single word made on him, a word he discovered in a book on medieval philosophy.  It would, as he says, "revolutionize my whole life."^[1]

What is this word?  It's the term "aseity."  It means "the power of a being to exist absolutely in virtue of itself, not as caused by itself, but as requiring no cause, no other justification for its existence except that its very nature is to exist."^[2]  He adds that aseity only describes one being:  God.  God is the only one whose very nature is to exist.  For everything else, nonexistence is a possibility.

Now why was that such a big deal for Thomas Merton?  Why does he spend so much time talking about this word?  Well, as he explains, "I had never had an adequate notion of what Christians meant by God."^[3]  I find that a fascinating statement.  He didn't understand the Christian idea of God.  This isn't someone from a cannibal tribe in the jungle.  Merton was raised in France, England, and the United States.  He was immersed in Christian culture, and yet he didn't understand what the Christian gospel says about God.

Thomas Merton had based his ideas about God on the example of the small, mean, and petty images he had gotten from the people he had met.  Such a God was too ridiculous to be taken seriously!  "What a relief it was" for him, then, "to discover…that no idea of ours, let alone any image, could adequately represent God."  Still, having made this discovery, he didn't really do anything with it.  "I could recognize that those who thought about God had a good way of considering Him," he says, "and that those who believed in Him really believed in someone, and their faith was more than a dream.  Further than that it seemed I could not go, for the time being."^[4]  Even though Merton was still holding back at this point, at least he was heading in the right direction!

That's the value of the word.  It serves to point the way.  In life we journey through ever-changing landscapes.  They may be landscapes of grand issues:  how to structure our societies, how to use new technologies.  They may be landscapes of things closer to home:  how to deal with the people in our families.  That can be a landscape of quicksand!  But wherever we are, we need a compass to avoid getting hopelessly lost.

Even when we don't feel holy, even when we don't feel like a child of God—even when we feel like a child of the devil—we still can know that God is love.  And we can still know that God loves us.  Meditate on John 3:16-17 for awhile and see what revelations you get!