Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity
Listen to audio version
Readings: 2 Kings 5: 1-14 and Luke 17: 11-19.
The theme of leprosy obviously links the two readings for today. Both stories tell us much about human nature – good and bad – and about God’s power to heal. The gospel passage also reminds us how unkind humans can be to people who are ‘not like us.’
It seems to me that Naaman was probably not afflicted with quite the same level of disease as the ten lepers in the story from Luke. Naaman was obviously an active military commander, able to mix with other people. Whereas the ten lepers in the second story were severely restricted in their movements by the law of Moses. In Jesus’ time, leprosy was one of the most feared diseases. If you caught leprosy, you were asked to leave your home, your community and to live out in the wilds. You might never see your loved ones again. It was believed that leprosy was infectious, and, as a safety measure, lepers were asked to keep their distance and to live ‘outside the camp’.
Here, as you know, we have in the chancel what has become known as the ‘leper tile’, which is dated 1456, and which features a text from the book of Job: “Have mercy on me, have mercy on me my friends, for the hand of God has touched me.” Job, you’ll remember, was afflicted with loathsome sores ‘from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.’ It could be that lepers took refuge here at Little Malvern Priory, well away from community – ‘outside the camp’- as it were. Our patron, Saint Giles, was a patron saint of lepers.
A footnote to the Naaman passage in one of my translations says that word used here for leprosy was a term for several skin diseases; precise meaning uncertain. But let us enjoy the story and its lessons about pride and humility. Israel and Aram – a small city of Syria – were in the middle of a long-running border dispute – then as now. A slave-girl who had been carried off had become the maid of Naaman’s wife. Despite this abduction, the maid evidently had her master’s best interests at heart. She knew about the healing powers of Elisha the prophet, and knew he could cure Naaman of his skin disease. So there’s one lesson at the very outset – try to do the best for the people life has thrown you together with.
Our readings leaflet today leaves out the couple of verses about the king of Aram writing a letter to the king of Israel asking him to arrange for Elisha to cure Naaman. You might consider that a pretty odd request, cheeky even – that a king sends a request to another king with whom he is in conflict asking for a favour. No wonder the king of Israel, as the expression goes ‘went off one on.’” Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.” But Elisha, on hearing all about it, asks to see Naaman.
It’s a vivid and comic scene that unfolds. Naaman came with his horses and chariots – he obviously had a high opinion of himself – and halted outside Elisha’s house. Elisha didn’t even bother to go out and meet him, perhaps unimpressed by the pomp. Elisha surely means to humiliate Naaman; maybe Elisha was not a very nice character. So here’s another lesson. As St. Paul writes in Romans, “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought to think.’ Nevertheless, despite the put down, Elisha gives Naaman a specific instruction. ‘Go and wash in the Jordan seven times.’ Naaman is not impressed. Surely Elisha would have come out to see me and waved his hand over the spot and cured me! And what’s wrong with Abana and Pharpar, our rivers back home? Aren’t they better than the waters of Israel? Any of you who have seen the river Jordan will know that it’s not impressive – nowhere near as wide as the Severn, as I recall.
But the servants persuade Naaman otherwise. ‘Boss, if you’d been asked to do something difficult, you’d have done it without a murmur. Why can’t you just do what he asked you to? So here’s another lesson – don’t be too proud to take advice even from people you don’t think should be giving it to you. So Naaman takes the plunge – and his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy. And then comes the punch-line; the culmination of the story. Naaman professes “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.”
Naaman was an outsider, not a member of the Jewish race. Yet this story shows Judaism as able to live with an acknowledgement of its God without any insistence on conversion. Naaman actually goes back home admitting to Elisha that he will have to accompany his master to the pagan house of Rimmon, but that he himself will offer sacrifices only to the Lord. When we come to the ten lepers in the gospel story, the punch-line here is that the only one who turned back to praise God after his cure was the Samaritan – the foreigner. It is typical of St. Luke that he chooses to show how the outsider comes to faith while the traditional people of God reject the message. Not that Jesus makes a distinction between one and another – all are cured. What is significant in the first place is that these ten lepers were a mixture of Jews and Samaritans. Normally they hated each other and kept well apart, but adversity makes strange bed-fellows. These men who would normally avoid each other have come together for company and understanding. It is one of the most valuable lessons of suffering that it teaches tolerance or fellow-feeling. And sympathy breeds tolerance. If only some of the lessons of these two stories could be reflected in the tragic situations of today, where nationalist fervour and religious intolerance seem to threaten the stability of many of the societies of the world.
The Samaritan who returned to praise God found faith; we are not told about the other nine. But rather than letting this story be one simply about Jesus and ten lepers, let us all recognise our need of Christ and his healing. John Pridmore suggests, “We are not asked to feel sorry for ‘lepers’ – or for Samaritans – but, using our imaginations in the story, to join them. Like them, may we cry out with the prayer those lepers and so many others since, have used. ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!’ Notice the word used when the Samaritan saw he was healed. He ‘turned back’ – praising God. The vocabulary of ‘turning’ in the New Testament is extensive and significant. The word used for ‘repentance’ is often synonymous with ‘turning back.’ What matters now, for us as for the Samaritan, after receiving God’s grace, is that we turn and face a new direction. Turning to Jesus involves a new effort – a step of obedience. Faith in Jesus is a moral response or it is not faith at all. Jesus says to the Samaritan, “Your faith has saved you – or ‘made you whole.’ The same words are said four times in Luke’s gospel. In each case, the one made whole is an ‘outcast’ in some way. If we are rejected, we disintegrate. We fall to bits and need someone to put us together again. That is the healing work of Jesus and his Church.
Then, continuing to use our imaginations – What about the other nine? Where are they? John Pridmore, again, suggests that the nine who didn’t return to thank and praise may represent for us the great majority of people ‘out there’ who may once have come under the influence of the Church in some way in the past, perhaps through home, school or church, but for whom now the Christian faith means little. Some of those ‘other nine’ might own to a sense of loss, others to a sense of liberation, if they had unhappy experiences of Church or the Church’s teaching. Jesus asks, ‘Where are they?’ – not perhaps with a feeling of displeasure, but with pity and concern. Let us not lose compassion and concern for those lost to faith, or who never found it.
It was the war-time Archbishop William Temple who famously said that ‘the Church exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.’ In fact, some versions have it that he said that the Church exists solely for the benefit of those who are not its members. He added that the Church ‘embodies God’s love by spreading the Gospel with acts of love and hope in the community and with service to those outside our walls. May we have the grace and will to tell others how our faith makes us whole, and offer hospitality and acceptance to those not yet walking with us in the way of faith.