Welcome to church on this Sunday when our readings direct us to two stories of cleansing. Elisha heals the Syrian General Naaman of his leprosy and likewise Jesus  heals ten lepers.

We come before the throne of Grace, aware of our need for God’s cleansing love. We offer to Him our sorrow, our needs and fears, our doubts and confusions. Today we remember especially the family of Ken Bigley brutally and tragically murdered in Iraq and all those who are bound up with the care for Charlotte Wyatt, in Portsmouth.

Proper 23 Year C 10 October 2004

There have been those who have tried to paint Jesus as the author of a sort of book of etiquette, there were some extraordinary commentaries in the 18 th and 19 th cs which portrayed Jesus as a well born princelet issuing in a new age of moderation and good manners: this morning’s gospel being the prompt to all well brought up people to write immediate and fulsome thank you letters.

There’s a lot more than politesse at issue in this morning’s gospel. There are many overtones of the OT lesson, so we must begin our excavations there.

Elisha inherited a double portion of his master Elijah’s spirit. There is an important undercurrent in the Gospel of Luke that Jesus fulfils the hopes and expectations left since the time of Elijah and Elisha. Naaman is afflicted with leprosy, a fearful plight for a mighty man in his position. For those of you who know Moliere you will remember that the servants in his plays are always the one with the upper hand, they direct the action and make the masters look a trifle foolish. It’s a powerful and subversive literary devise to keep you as the reader amused and intrigued, “what’s going to happen next?” “how will he get out of this one?”

An Israelite slave girl knows of Elisha’s significance and advises her mistress that Naaman should go to Israel – to Samaria no less to seek for healing.

The story fastforwards to Naaman setting out from Syria to the King of Israel, with a retinue befitting his rank. The King is startled and disconcerted, of course he would like to think he could cure leprosy, but actually he can’t, he tears his garment, a symbolic sign of deep disturbance, the echoes of which reverberate around the kingdom. Elisha hears and, being like the servants elsewhere in this story, he mollifies his Lord and takes the initiative. He will see to Naaman’s leprosy and honour will be saved on all sides.

When the great warrior arrives, the prophet is at a distance, the communication is all through messengers: “Go and wash seven times in the Jordan and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.” Naaman had envisaged something more immediate, and even caring than that. He is indignant and he is in danger of flouncing off in a huff – I am sure we all know people who are capable of similar behaviour, when their dignity is hurt. Again the servants come into their own, with a little pleading and common sense they persuade the mighty man to get off his high horse and into the trickle he knows as the Jordan. The hardened general emerges from the waters with the skin of a little child. However much he would like to appear the bluff leader of thousands he is reduced to his most basic self in the purging springs of the Jordan valley.

This narrative has several points to make. Elisha says the first overtly. When he tells the king to send Naaman to him he says to send him to me “that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel”. The spirit of the living God was made known and active by this witnessing to a stranger of its miraculous powers.

The story goes on that Naaman takes with him earth from Israel, that he may continue to worship the God of Israel. This evokes ancient belief that gods belonged to places. At least Naaman can see that the Lord God does not belong exclusively to peoples as well. He can be the beneficiary of the Lord God’s lavish love. A hard pill to swallow for an ardent and chauvinistic nationalist.

Connected with this is a theme which runs through the OT, that the Lord God is not confined to Israel as either people or place. As Israel grows in its awareness of their God so more and more they see that they are the foretaste of what God is seeking to achieve in his creation.

When Jesus heals ten lepers on the borders of Judaea and Samaria, we know he is in Elisha territory in more ways than one. The lepers call out to Jesus, they cannot approach him or anyone else, perhaps a deliberate allusion to Elisha doing everything through messengers.

He calls out to them immediately, “’Go and show yourselves to the priests,’ and they went and they were clean”. Again the ancient maxim is revealed, eight centuries after it was first known that “Truly there is a prophet in Israel”. The lepers are to take this message to the local priest, Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem, perhaps he is saying indirectly to the priest: “take this message to your colleagues on Mount Zion.”

One of the ten, the Samaritan returns. By now Samaria is not what it was in Elisha’s day. It was once the thriving centre of the northern kingdom of Israel, with abundant wealth and independent government, by the time of Jesus, the Samaritans were a bastard race, despised by Jesus’s contemporaries.

Note what the Samaritan does and does not do. He does not turn back and say just say “thank you”. He turns back (code for repent) and praises God with a loud voice, prostrates himself at Jesus’s feet and expresses his thanks. This is no first century thank you letter. The Samaritan understands something very deeply. At the outset of Luke’s Gospel, Zechariah blesses God at the naming ceremony of his son John. Zechariah sets out what he can foresee as the outworking of this remarkable new age: John will be the forerunner of the one who will “give knowledge of salvation to his people.”

The Samaritan, the outcast has been healed, but he hasn’t just been made better, in the same way that Naaman wasn’t just made better, they are the vehicles for an expression of Theological truth. The Samaritan has been made to know two things that Zechariah said would happen; he has known in his healing a metaphor of salvation. Jesus makes people well not just to relieve suffering, but to assure people of ultimate redemption in Him. The Samaritan was a double outcast, a hated alien and a leper. He knows not just the foretaste of all liberation, but his inclusion into the people of Israel: “to give knowledge of salvation unto his people”.

This last week’s news has been harrowing, the needless death of an innocent man and the high court ruling about Charlotte Wyatt. Both cases heighten our sense of the value of life as redeemed and cleansed by God and they draw us to another line in the song of Zechariah: “give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death and guide our feet into the way of peace.”

The Revd. William Gulliford