This long story is a-buzz with talk. Someone is always passing a message:

• the servant girl tells her mistress,
• the mistress tells the master—a general named Naaman,
• the general tells his king,
• the king writes a letter—the Aramean king to the Israelite king,
• the prophet Elisha hears a rumour about the Israelite king and sends him a message,
• Elisha sends out a messenger to Naaman,
• the general’s servants coax him into compliance, and finally,
• Gehazi brings Naaman a (fraudulent) message from the prophet.

Nine different people have direct speaking parts in this story.

Then, the river runs through this story (with apologies to Robert Redford’s movie of a similar title)—

• right through the middle column of the text (see the text handout);
• right through the life of Naaman, this Gentile with a loathsome skin condition;
• right through the Bible, from the rivers that watered the Garden of Eden to the river of the water of life in the book of Revelation—

the river that is God’s unique self-disclosure and will to save.

The story opens and closes with lepers: One of them is Naaman, a general in the Aramean army, who gets healed in the course of the story; the other is Gehazi, a servant to the prophet Elisha, who acquires the condition at the end of the story (marked on the handout).

What is leprosy, at least in the Bible? Scholars are agreed on what it is not: It isn’t the disease called “leprosy” around the world, sometimes called “Hansen’s disease.” As to what it is, the Bible describes a revolting skin condition, marked sometimes by hot lesions, sometimes by ulcers, sometimes by flaking and scaling skin.

These three people with names—Naaman, Elisha, and Gehazi—are full-fledged characters in the story with realistic traits and motivation; their words, actions, and interactions give the story its central direction and force.

There are also lesser figures, all of them without names. There is first this little Israelite girl, a victim of Aramean raids on Israel, snatched and carried back to Damascus. There, she has become a servant to Naaman’s wife. It is she who starts the action going, for hers are the first words spoken in the story: She tells her lady that the prophet in her home country could cure the master of his leprosy. (Samaria is the capital city of the northern kingdom, Israel.) In sermons preached on this story, the little girl has often been the focus, for she is indeed exemplary: Wrenched from her home by soldiers and placed in a different culture, language, and religion, she still bears her own testimony to the power of Israel’s God.

It doesn’t take long for Naaman to hear this, and he reports it at once to his king. It sounds hopeful, but, “Would he see me, your Majesty? A foreigner, a raider, a... leper unclean?”

There are obstacles, but Aram is the more powerful of the two countries, and the king believes he can compel an appointment. Gifts will help, but he will also write a letter, king to king, and the commander will carry the letter himself. I have held in my own hand many such clay tablets reading exactly as this one does: “When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant So-and-so, and you should do such-and-such.” This letter is very specific: You are to cure Naaman of his leprosy.

On one level, it’s a big opening for Israel; should the Israelite king deliver this healing, the balance of obligation would certainly shift; Damascus would owe Israel a big one, and at the very least, the raiding parties would have to stop.

But Israel’s king doesn’t even try. What does he do? He rips his clothes. When you and I tear our clothes, it’s an accident and is itself bad news: “I tore my good suit, I ripped my new dress.” That morning in Samaria, the king tears the royal garments on purpose—it’s a symbolic act, of course, expressing majestic dismay—and it’s because the bad news has already arrived. “He’s looking for an excuse to invade,” he fumes. “Am I God, to deal death or give life? How can I cure his precious general?”

He’s a king who doesn’t know his kingdom, an insider who doesn’t know what’s on the inside; he’s too busy counting pennies to know where there might be a prophet, too busy with the men of war to know a man of God. He has the best rolodex in the east, but he doesn’t know anyone who can cure a leper.

“A little girl knows how, your Majesty; why don’t you? A child of your own people knows. His name is a household word. Think, your Majesty!” But, no: The king rips his clothes.

Eventually, the royal response gets around to Elisha, and he sends the king a message of his own. “Why?” he asks. “A waste of good purple! Let the general come to me: He will learn that there is a prophet in Israel.”

He might have said, “Let him come to me, your Majesty, and you will learn that there is a prophet in Israel,” but this story is not really about Israel’s king: He’s there, nameless, a monarch without a moniker—a type of leader who fails because he has no link with the word of God.

• Where is revelation to be found?
• Where is spiritual power?
• Where is healing?

He doesn’t know and doesn’t care.

But it’s Naaman who learns in this story, and, now that Elisha is on board, the action moves ahead. The general arrives at the prophet’s house in full military array: horses, chariots, drivers, grooms, and mechanics. In front of the prophet’s house, it’s more crowded than Bucyrus during the Bratwurst Festival. Naaman knows he’s nothing to look at, oozing and flaking, but with the full military display, the prophet can’t miss how important this visitor is.

That’s the first thing Naaman learns: God’s not impressed with hardware. A verse in the psalms runs,

Some trust in horses, some trust in chariots,
but we will trust in the Lord, our God.

This is a lesson that may take us a lifetime to learn, as it did the prophet Samuel: God does not look on the outward appearance but on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7).

With that, a door opens in Elisha’s house, and someone comes out.

You may remember one of Alan Milne’s children’s poems:

They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace,
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
A face looked out, but it wasn’t the king’s.
“He’s much too busy signing things,”
     Says Alice.

A man comes out, but it isn’t the prophet. What the prophet may be signing, we don’t know, but he sends instead a messenger who gives his instructions: “Go and bathe seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.”

Up to this point, the story has spoken of a “cure” for Naaman’s leprosy (vs 3, 6, 7), but now, the prophet uses different language. Naaman’s flesh will “be restored”—that’s the removal of his skin condition—but also, he will “be clean.” In the biblical view, leprosy is a disease that implies a status,

• a medical condition that carries a social exclusion,
• a revolting appearance that stands for what estranges us from our community.

When Elisha sends word about the healing, he speaks of both the body and the spirit. Naaman, being a gentile, is an outsider to Israel even without his leprosy; to “be clean” means to become part of the social group, the community that gathers around God and the divine will to save.

Naaman’s first words in the story arrive just here and are framed by reports of his angry stalking away. He has expected the prophet in person, with a ceremonious liturgy of healing, complete with gestures to point out the lesions that had banished him from society. Instead, he gets this... this... assistant, this underling.

But the word messenger is important. This is a story that touches two different ancient near-eastern courts, and it uses five different words for slaves, servants, and sherpas,b ut none of those people come out to instruct Naaman, for it is the divine word that reaches him, and its bearer is a messenger.

We must remember: that is what we have in the church: revelation, truth from beyond ourselves. It flickers in the visions of the patriarchs and startles us at the Red Sea and in the other miracles of salvation history. It thunders from the flourescent cloud at Sinai and lights our path in the lamp of Scripture. It reaches our hearts in the inspired preaching of the prophets. It comes out to us from God, as does Lady Wisdom of the book of Proverbs, to call, to invite, to plead. These all are messengers of the divine word, declaring to us the character and expectations of God. Then, finally, having spoken to us in many and various ways, God, in these last days, has spoken to us through a Son, now no longer a messenger but the Message itself, the Word made flesh (Hebrews 1:1–2).

This is where Naaman learns something else, for the prophetic instructions send him down to the Jordan River. The Jordan is already below sea level as it exits from Lake Galilee in the north, and it drops steadily until it flows into the Dead Sea at a thousand feet below sea level. From Samaria, it’s a long hike, down into tropical heat to the river—one remembers in the Just So stories “the great gray-green greasy waters of the Limpopo,” surely a cognate stream—and then it’s uphill all the way back. We hardly blame Naaman for remembering the cold and crystal streams that feed Damascus from the mountains of the anti-Lebanon.

What Naaman learns is that revelation may be scandalous. He comes from Damascus, ancient, urbane, cosmopolitan, in its long day so lush with beauty that Muhammad refused to go there, saying that one could enter paradise only once. Israel’s capital, Samaria, is a new city, founded by the breakaway northern tribes, bare, provincial, nouveau riche. The waters named with the two cities epitomize the differences, and who can fail to prefer Damascus?

Yet he does not have a choice. It’s go to the Jordan or go home a leper, and when he finally does what the prophet asks, his healing is complete. Why should God be so particular?

This is the scandal of particularity, already present in the old covenant and which, in some form, the church embraces as well.

The apostle Paul found that sophisticated Greeks and Romans could not accept the idea of the resurrection, for a faith with the miraculous embedded in it was a skandalon, a stumbling block (1 Cor 1:23). Nor could sophisticated Jews accept the idea of a Messiah who was crucified—a faith with “failure” embedded at its centre. “Jews seek for a sign,” Paul said, “and the Greeks seek for sophistication, but we preach Jesus Christ and him crucified... the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:22–24).

“How do you view the uniqueness of Jesus Christ?” the Study Catechism asks, and replies,

“No one else will ever be God incarnate. No one else will ever die for the sins of the world. Jesus Christ is such a person, and he, in fact, has done these things.”

Then, Naaman learns a third thing, for Elisha refuses in the most categorical terms to accept any of those very handsome and splendid gifts. Here, already, in this wayward kingdom of Israel, with a king who hasn’t a clue, is the Gospel of grace: All that God does—healing through divine power, accepting people without regard to their “status”—all that is free. None of it can be earned or bought.

Nothing in my hands I bring;
Simply to thy cross I cling.

Now, the story could well end here, but there is yet another scene: The prophet’s assistant surfaces—Gehazi, the ultimate insider, working within the household of the man of God and privy to all its goings-on.

Yet he is distant from the prophetic word and seems to know nothing of the power of God that not only heals people but accepts them apart from their cultural standing. To Gehazi, Elisha is little more than an incompetent businessman who has missed a chance for big cash (so Arie Leder). See how testily he speaks of Elisha’s letting “that Aramean Naaman” off without taking what he had brought (v 20). He decides to pursue the entourage and gratify his own cupidity.

Naaman’s party is large and slow-moving, and Gehazi soon overtakes them. In his first lies, he invents a story and a request: He tells the general that Elisha has gotten unexpected company, two junior prophets in need of support. Could Naaman, he asks, give them a talent of silver and two changes of clothes? Naaman urges upon him double the amount of silver, and it takes two servants to carry it all back to the house. Then, Gehazi goes in to Elisha and lies about what he has done.

The narrative here gives us a signal of what is happening by the way it positions the servant. When Naaman was with Elisha in v 15, he stood “before” the prophet, lifnê—that is, within the circle of influence and acknowledgement, but now, in v 25, he stands “near” or “beside” him—’el. Already, he has moved to the edge of the crowd. He is an outsider to Israel’s true faith and practice.

His departure from Elisha as a leper is thus the ironic reversal of Naaman’s arrival and healing. It is possible to be intimately associated with divine things, with that unique revelation that meets us in salvation history and in the church’s scripture, and yet never to experience power in your own life. See how Naaman arrives at the prophet’s home and, after an intense struggle with pride, submits to God’s way, but Gehazi grows up in Samaria and works in that same home, but goes away an outsider, declared and proven by his crude duplicity.

“Let him come here,” Elisha says (v 8). I wonder if we feel as confident as he to say the same thing... for the sick are still looking for a cure; the unclean are still looking for a change of standing; the sequestered, the cabined, the confined are looking for acceptance by God and the perfect freedom of his service. Dare we say, “Let them come here?”

We must. Let them come here. They will learn that there is a God in Israel. Let them come here, and they will find a Saviour. Let them come here: The river runs through, and it can make clean.

For, in coming—      in receiving the divine word,      in yielding up to it the obedience of mind and heart,      in crying out, as Thomas did to the risen Christ, “My Lord and my God!”      in dipping yourself in the scandalous water of the Jordan— you will be clean!

Thanks be to God for his Word!

A paper by Dr. Arie Leder was helpful in preparing this exposition. It is “2 Kings 5 in the Pulpit: One Leper or Two?” in Reading and Hearing the Word: Essays in Honor of John H. Stek (Grand Rapids: Calvin Theological Seminary, 1998), p. 91-106.