Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the sixth Sunday after Epiphany, February 16, 2003, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.II Kings 5:1-15; I Corinthians 9:24-27; Mark 1:40-45 Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it?
-II Kings 5:13
Good question, and it has the desired effect of talking Naaman down off his high horse and into the River Jordan where he is cured of his leprosy.
Naaman is the sort of man who would much rather do something difficult but befitting his dignity than something easy but stupid. His ego has certain non-negotiable minimum requirements that must be met by any proposed course of action. Taking seven dips in the River Jordan does not come close to meeting those requirements.
I can relate to that, even though my station in life is nowhere near his. I mean, look at it from his point of view. He's brought along this huge entourage of chariots and horses and mules and servants and soldiers and bearers to carry those ten changes of clothes and all the gold and silver, and by the time he gets to the Jordan he's also picked up a whole mob of gawkers and hawkers from among the natives, not to mention the reporters, the TV crews, and the helicopters clattering overhead. And now what he's supposed to do is, he's supposed to take off all his clothes and his underwear, and clamber down the muddy riverbank buck naked and barefoot, and wade out into the middle, where it's maybe all of two feet deep, and squat down low enough to get his head under, and splash himself some, and then stand up and shake off the water, and then squat down again: down splash up, down splash up, down splash up, seven times altogether. Would you do it? More power to you if you could. It's all I can do to let one nurse see me in a hospital johnny.
Why must we be humiliated in order to be healed? What is it about the process of caregiving that makes it necessary to embarrass, shame, and mortify the person being cared for? This is what's running through Naaman's head while, slowly and reluctantly, and with as much pathetic and comical dignity as he can summon, he begins to undress himself in public.
I feel for the guy. And so do his servants, clearly, but they don't want him to let his ego needs keep him from being cured of leprosy. So they intervene, saying, Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, wouldn't you have done it? It was not customary for servants to address their master as "Father". "Father" connoted affection and intimacy, then as now. But they're letting him know he's important to them, and they want him to be well because they care about him, not just because he's the Big Enchilada of Aram. They're telling him they look up to him and they will keep on looking up to him even if Elisha makes a fool out of him. This is what it takes to persuade a proud man to take off his clothes. This is what it takes to separate a general from his uniform, insignia, medals and ribbons.
These are remarkable servants. They could have let the big guy stew in his own juices. It would have served him right, for lording it over them and everybody else. But they cared about him. Even more remarkable is the young girl whom Naaman's armies had taken captive from the land of Israel, who was assigned to be his wife's personal slave. This whole thing is her idea. If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him! But why on earth does she want to do him a favor?
The heroes of this story are not Elisha and Naaman. They're just a pair of show-offs. The heroes are the slave girl and the servants who undertook to save Naaman from himself. And the biggest miracle in the story isn't the healing properties of the waters of the Jordan. The biggest miracle is that Naaman had the brains to listen to his inferiors. How often, in your experience, do the powers and principalities pay attention to ordinary folks?
Naaman was a career military man. We've all known their sort; we have a few of them here. They are gifted with the gift of discipline, and discipline is first of all self-control, and only secondarily the ability to command others. Imagine the self-control that was required of Naaman at every stage of this story where he had to be humble in order to have a chance of being healed. This was a rather different sort of discipline from the kind that he normally exercised, but it made all the difference for him.
The apostle Paul, on the other hand, prefers the athletic metaphor to the military one. He compares himself to a long-distance runner. He punishes and enslaves his body to the cause of following and serving Christ, and obviously takes great joy in doing so. I can relate to this. So can you, if running is your drug of choice. Everybody else thinks it's weird. But the key word is still discipline or self-control. Athletes exercise self-control in all things, he says.
We think of discipline as rule-keeping, but it can involve rule-breaking. It can involve insisting, against all resistance, that one rule is more important than another rule and so you have to break the other. That's what happens in today's Gospel. This leper comes roaring up to Jesus: You can make me clean if you choose to! The community had rules about lepers. You can look it up in Leviticus. They had to stay at least 50 feet away from other people. They had to holler out, Unclean! Unclean! whenever they were in public, to warn people off. This guy breaks all the rules by barging right into the crowd and getting close enough to touch. An in-your-face leper! It's unthinkable.
But Jesus breaks the rules too, by touching him. Mark what he's doing. He isn't just curing the leper. He's making himself unclean by touching him. He's making himself as untouchable as a leper. The healing of the leper is worth that to him. You noticed that he did the same thing with women. In the New Testament women aren't much better than lepers.
He could get around his own uncleanness by means of the various cleansing rituals also prescribed in Leviticus, but there again, this leper sabotaged him. Jesus told him not to tell anyone how he'd healed him, but he blabbed it all over the place, making Jesus into such a celebrity that he couldn't move about freely anymore, and giving him such a magical aura that when he began talking about bearing the cross, nobody heard a word he said.
What the leper's really saying to him is, Can you be bothered with me? And Jesus' answer is, Yes, I can be bothered with you. I choose to be bothered with you. I choose to put my own needs and desires aside for you. Obviously for both of them, the rule of having compassion for another person's suffering can trump the rules of ritual cleanliness. But it takes discipline and self-control to resist the rules that everybody else is following.
The rules that are generally followed in almost every culture depend on having a scapegoat. Some person who is noticeably different, or some class of people who are different, gets ostracized and the community thinks to save itself by pushing them out. The treatment of lepers two thousand years ago is only one of a million instances of scapegoating. There is a theology that underlies this. The theology says: God doesn't let bad things happen to good people. Bad things are happening to you. Therefore you are bad, and in order for us to be good we must push you away and treat you as unacceptable.
I wonder what it will take to convince the world that it doesn't work. It doesn't work because you can't really get rid of the scapegoat: The unacceptable is always popping up again right in our midst, right in ourselves, and we can't get rid of ourselves. Well, I guess we could, but it's not much of a solution.
Christian theology at its truest and best rejects scapegoating across the board. I wish I could assure you that Christ has fought that battle for us all and won it for good, but he hasn't. What he has done is, he has opened the way for people like us to stand against the fear and hatred of the Other, and for the greater truth that the whole human race is in the same boat and it's God's boat. But as Naaman would be quick to point out, that'll take some discipline.
Amen