What if this is a story about people who refuse to accept the places the world has assigned them? Consider the cast of characters. Naaman is a powerful military commander. He has the king's confidence, the admiration of his country, and the resources to command almost anything. However he cannot command his own body to be well.
An unnamed Israelite girl is a prisoner of war. She has been taken from her home and made to serve Naaman's wife. By every measure of the social and political order, she is powerless. She has no army, no wealth, no royal audience, and no apparent future of her own.
In this story she is the first person who knows what to do. She speaks. Not to the king. Not to the military commander. Not to the prophet. She speaks to her mistress, suggesting that Naaman visit the prophet in Samaria.
It is an astonishing moment. The captive offers freedom to her captor. The powerless person becomes the source of possibility for the powerful person. We might expect bitterness from her. We might even consider bitterness justified. Instead, she offers something that Naaman cannot purchase: hope.
We don't know whether she forgives Naaman. We don't know what happened to her family or whether she ever returned home. The text doesn't tell us. We should resist making her into a convenient example of cheerful forgiveness. What we do know is that she speaks a word that changes the direction of someone else's life.
Then she disappears. I wonder how many stories of faith begin with people who never get mentioned again. People who open a door, offer a possibility, challenge an assumption, or simply refuse to let someone else's suffering go unnoticed. People whose names we never learn, whose contributions are never celebrated, and whose influence may be greater than they could possibly imagine.
I read the first miracle in this story isn't a healing of Naaman's skin. It is the disruption of the social order. The next disruption comes when Naaman arrives at the house of Elisha. He has brought letters from his king, horses, chariots, and a substantial amount of silver and gold. He is prepared for a diplomatic encounter. He expects the prophet to recognize his importance.
Elisha doesn't even come outside. Instead, he sends a messenger. I imagine Naaman's reaction. A man accustomed to being received with ceremony is given instructions by an unnamed subordinate. A military commander who has crossed international boundaries is told to wash in a river that he considers inferior.
Naaman is furious. I wonder if his anger is about something more than the Jordan. He has arrived expecting to be the central character in a story about his healing. He expects his importance to determine the terms of the encounter. He wants the prophet to acknowledge him, perform for him, and make his healing an event worthy of his status.
Elisha refuses to participate. The servants speak, approach their master and ask why he won't do something so simple. If the prophet had demanded an extraordinary accomplishment, Naaman would have undertaken it. Why not accept something ordinary?
Here is another extraordinary reversal: the people who are supposed to obey Naaman become the people who teach him. The unnamed girl has spoken. The unnamed messenger has spoken. Now the servants speak.
Naaman, the man with the authority to command armies, must learn to listen to people who have no authority over him. And that brings me to what may be the most unexpected question in this passage: What if the real obstacle to healing isn't our brokenness, but our insistence on remaining in charge?
Naaman is willing to travel thousands of miles. He is willing to spend enormous sums of money. He is willing to ask kings for assistance. He is willing to pursue a cure with all the determination and resources available to him. Yet he isn't initially willing to do the one thing that requires no special status, no money, and no extraordinary ability.
He must receive. He must allow someone else to tell him what to do. He must enter a river that doesn't impress him. He must accept that his healing will come through a process that makes no distinction between a great military commander and an ordinary person. In the Jordan, Naaman cannot be a general. He cannot be a foreign dignitary. He cannot be a celebrated military hero.
He is simply a human being who needs help. That is where the story becomes especially interesting for us. We live in a culture that admires independence, accomplishment, self-sufficiency, and the ability to solve problems. We celebrate the people who take charge. We admire those who know what they want and have the determination to get it.
There is nothing inherently wrong with these qualities. The question is what happens when the next important step requires us to stop being the person who knows what to do? What happens when the wisdom we need comes from someone with less education, less authority, less money, or less social standing? What happens when the answer is so ordinary that we almost refuse to recognize it?
Naaman's healing requires a community. A captive girl points the way. A prophet's messenger delivers the instruction. Servants challenge their master's assumptions. And a river becomes the place where everything changes.
God seems remarkably unconcerned with the organizational chart. There is one more detail I find fascinating. After Naaman emerges from the Jordan, his flesh is restored "like the flesh of a young boy." The language suggests more than a medical recovery. The powerful commander has been given something like a new beginning.
He has become new by allowing himself to become dependent. He has found strength by surrendering control. He has discovered the God of Israel by listening to people who occupy the lowest positions in his own world. Then he makes his confession: "Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel."
Perhaps Naaman has finally understood something the rest of us are still struggling to learn. God does not need our power to accomplish God's purposes. God does not need our status, our credentials, our wealth, or our carefully organized plans.
I wonder who the unnamed young girl would be in our lives today. The person whose opinion we don't ordinarily seek. The person whose position makes it easy to overlook their wisdom. The person who has little influence in the rooms where important decisions are made.
And I wonder whether we might sometimes be Naaman: so accustomed to our own importance, experience, and expectations that we fail to recognize the grace being offered to us.
There is a quiet revolution taking place in this story. It isn't led by a king, a general, or even a prophet. It is led by people who refuse to remain confined to their assigned roles. We could learn something from that.
Naaman went to Israel to be healed of a disease. He came away having discovered that the world was much larger than his understanding of it. I suspect that is a pretty good definition of conversion. Not simply changing our minds about God, but discovering that God has been at work all along in the people, places, and possibilities we had failed to notice.
The miracle of the Jordan is not that the water was extraordinary. It is that Naaman finally became willing to enter it.
No comments:
Post a Comment