Normally when it comes around in the liturgical year, the Old Testament story of Naaman seems to serve only as a backdrop for the Gospel: among the ten miraculously cured, the lone foreigner among them is the one who returns to Jesus with thankfulness and so to earn His praise. It caught my eye on its own today.
Naaman is a valiant and respected man, ill with leprosy. He travels to Israel to be cured on the counsel of a Jewish child, a serving-girl.
Bearing riches and a letter of introduction, he seeks his cure first from the king. The king offers no help, only suspicion.
On the prophet’s invitation, Naaman travels next to the prophet, expecting the prophet to cure "the spot" with his own hands by the power of God.
To his shock the prophet instead sends him to wash in the river and be clean, something so ordinary he cannot believe it will help. Persuaded by his own servants to try anyway, he does so; and not only is "the spot" taken away, but he is practically reborn from the water in a new skin: "his flesh became again like the flesh of a little child."
As I listened this morning to the reading — which begins halfway through the story, just as Naaman plunges in the river — most of what struck me was the overabundance of the cure. He hoped for a simple cure, a removal of "the spot;" he didn’t really expect anything from this washing; and what he got wasn’t a simple excision but a second birth.
This is a good image to have in mind when you hear the abused words "born again;" you have to be ready for it and not shrink away from the complete rebirth, the complete overhaul of self, because when you go to Christ seeking help with a troublesome spot, He is not satisfied except to scrape the whole thing away and start over.
Going back to the extract later to read the context, I saw again the intrigue of the many characters involved here. Leading up to the moment when Naaman plunges in the river are the Jewish slave girl; not one king but two; the silent wife, mistress of the servant-girl; the prophet; the commander’s servants. None is there by chance. Together they make the story of Naaman a surprisingly rich text for meditation.
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