Epiphany 6
II Kings 5:1-14
Try doing this sometime. Take an empty 2-Liter bottle, and fill it up half way with just plain water, and the other half fill up with vegetable oil. Then try shaking that bottle up and mixing those two things together. What’s going to happen? Well, you can shake that bottle all day, but as soon as you stop shaking it, the oil and the water are going to separate from each other in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. Why? Back in 11th Grade Chemistry Class you learned that oil and water are “polar opposites” of each other. These two substances have a totally different chemical make-up from each other, which makes it impossible for them to mix together. Polar opposites just don’t mix.
There are a lot of different things that we could study today in the story of the Healing of Naaman’s Leprosy. We could talk about the importance of witnessing your faith, as the young girl did to her master. We could talk about how even in the Old Testament, God proved that he was interested in the salvation of all people, Jews and Gentiles alike. We could talk about the awesome power of God, which is able to heal the worst of our diseases. And while we will briefly touch on all these points, what we’re going to focus on this morning are the polar opposites in this story. We are going to study the characters and see a number of things that just don’t mix very well inside a person: 1. Faith & Unbelief 2. Humility & Pride. Yes, these things are all polar opposites of each other.
Part I
This is not a story that is difficult to understand. It begins with a man named Naaman. And the original text of verse 1 reads, “Naaman: 1. commnder of the army of the king of Aram. 2. A great man with his master. 3. In high favor. 4. By him the Lord had given victory to Aram. 5. A mighty man of courage. 6. Leper.” The last word of the Hebrew text really jumps out at you, because there is nothing linking it to the rest of the sentence. Verse 1 simple states all the wonderful things Naaman had going for him, and that verse ends with the single word “leper.” Here was a man who had everything going for him. He was powerful. He was respected. He was victorious. He was no doubt fairly wealthy. He was about as successful as you can be in this world, except for the small fact that he happened to have leprosy. And how that changes everything! Leprosy was a living death. There were two common types of leprosy, one that would kill you in 20 years, and one that would take your life in 10. Naaman was in the early stages of his leprosy, and whichever type that he had, he knew the end result: he was going to die a slow death, gradually seeing his earthly achievements replaced by declining frailty. Power was going to give way to weakness. Honor was going to give way to shame. An awful way to die!
And if we look at the Cliff’s Notes of this story, we see that Naaman’s servant girl tells him about a prophet in Israel who can heal him. Naaman goes to this prophet Elisha, and is healed. That’s the story, but let’s dig a little deeper and look at both the faith and unbelief of several of the characters here.
Obviously this story has to start with the servant girl. I mean, we call it “The Story of the Healing of Naaman’s Leprosy,” but without this girl, there would be no story. Let’s find out as much as we can about this girl. Verse 2 says, “Now bands from Aram had gone out and had taken captive a young girl from Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife.” This tells us a bit what kind of warfare Naaman’s army was involved in. Yes, there were traditional battles such as the one in which Naaman’s army had killed wicked King Ahab on the battlefield. But there were also these raids in which Naaman’s army would go into defenseless towns in Israel and terrorize them. This little girl who was the slave of Naaman’s wife had been kidnapped on one of these raids. Most likely, her father had been killed by Naaman’s soldiers as he tried to defend his household. Possibly this girl’s mother was also dead, or perhaps she too was sold into slavery to another family, where she would never see her little girl again. Now put yourself in this little girl’s shoes: you’ve been captured and taken away to a foreign land, you probably watched your father being killed, you’re most likely never going to see your mother again. How would you feel about the power of your God? Wouldn’t it have been so easy for this little girl to feel that her God, the Lord, was really pretty powerless to help weak people like her? I’m sure Naaman’s family would have loved this girl to serve their gods. And that would have made sense. After all, it was Aram’s gods that were victorious, not Israel’s God.
This little girl shows us something significant: the most powerful faith is a simple faith. Sometimes we Christians want to have all the answers to counter any questions and attacks on our beliefs. But this girl wasn’t worried about that. She had faith. She didn’t need to have all the answers. She knew that the Lord had the answers! Look at this young but powerful faith show itself in verse 3, “If only my master would see the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.”
Where had she gotten this faith? No doubt it was from her parents. We can almost imagine the time before she was taken into captivity, when in the evening the family would sit around the kitchen table and mom and dad would talk about all the astounding things the Lord had done for his people through prophets like Elijah and Elisha. This girl’s faith was strong enough to survive the terrible ordeal of capture, of slavery. But her faith was so strong because it was so simple. She didn’t demand answers from God. She simply knew that the Lord had all the answers.
In stark contrast to her faith is the unbelief of her king. The King of Israel at this time was a man named Joram. And while this girl grew up learning from her parents about the True God, Joram grew up learning from his parents Ahab and Jezebel about false, worthless gods like Baal. And it comes as no surprise that when things got rough for Joram, he had no anchor. He received this letter from Naaman’s king, asking for his permission to have Naaman cured of his leprosy. And he panicked. He had no answer, because he had no faith. Our text tells about Joram, “As soon as the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his robes and said, ‘Am I God? Can I kill and bring back to life? Why does this fellow send someone to me to be cured of leprosy? See how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me!’” Joram is typical of how unbelievers act. He jumps to the worst possible conclusion about other people’s motives. He is suspicious of other people. He has no trust, because he has no faith. There is a saying that goes “suspicion haunts the guilty soul.” Joram can’t trust other people because he doesn’t trust the Lord.
We could also talk about the faith of other people in this story, Naaman, Elisha, and even Naaman’s king, who probably wasn’t a believer but had more trust that the Lord could work miracles than Israel’s own king! But just comparing the little girl and King Joram is enough to show us that faith and unbelief are polar opposites. Two people could not have acted more different!
Every time I fly on a plane, there is one part of the flight that is always the same: that fun little safety demonstration with the flight attendants. And you know the drill: they want you to find out where the closest exit is for you, they want to remind you that your seat is also a floatation device, and they tell you about how oxygen masks will come down should the cabin lose pressure. But there’s one thing that they say that always made me think, about those oxygen masks. They say, “Be sure that you secure your own mask first before trying to assist others.” Now at first, that statement seems a little selfish to me. Basically what it’s saying is: take care of yourself before you take care of anyone else. But then I thought about it a little more. And it would be a little hard for me to help others if I was passed out on the floor for lack of oxygen. So it’s absolutely necessary that I do help myself before I try helping my family.
The same thing goes with our faith. You can’t give what you don’t have. The girl in the story was able to share faith because she had a strong faith. Joram was unable to help at all because he had no faith to give. So in this first section, you see the necessity of making sure that you have all the faith you can possibly hold! Because if you don’t do everything to grow your faith, you won’t be much help to others. So what are you doing in your life to consistently grow your faith?
Part II
There are two other things that are completely opposite of each other: humility and pride. And again, we look at this little girl as the epitome of humility and love. She could have been bitter. She could have been angry at God for her lot in life. She could have been looking for an opportunity to find joy in the hardships of her master Naaman who had been responsible for her kidnapping. But we see a person, not with the spirit of revenge, but with the spirit of Christ. And it almost sounds impossible, but with the Lord she can be bold and humble at the same time, “if only my master would see the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.”
And now we will contrast the girl’s humility with another character in the story, Naaman. If you look at a few of the details of this account, Naaman strikes us as a person who was very interested in making sure that people knew what an important person he was. Look at the gift he sends as payment for his healing: ten talents of silver and 6,000 shekels of gold. That’s 750 pounds of silver and 150 pounds of gold. I plugged those numbers into yesterday’s gold and silver prices, and the silver was worth $54,000 in today’s money, and the gold was worth $854,400. An astounding price from a wealthy man, in addition to 10 costly sets of clothing! Naaman’s a guy who likes people to know how important he is. Look at how he stops over to the prophet’s house, “Naaman went with his horses and chariots and stopped at the door of Elisha’s house.” It would be pretty impressive if a 5-Star general came to our church some Sunday morning, riding in a parade of tanks and HumVees. If that happened, the message he’d obviously want to send is: “hey, I’m pretty important! You better take notice of me and honor me as I deserve!”
And yes, before Naaman’s leprosy was healed, he needed to be rid of his pride. And the prophet does that in a very clever way. He doesn’t even go out to meet this grand entourage at the door of his house. He just sends a servant with idiotically simple
instructions. Elisha is trying to say to Naaman: “I’m not really a powerful or important person, the power is with the Lord. And you’re not really a powerful or important person either. Your power is from the Lord too.” And Naaman is irate at this effort to curb his pride. He says, “I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, wave his hand over the spot and cure me of my leprosy.” Oh, Naaman was looking for something spectacular to happen. After all, he wasn’t just paying to be healed, he was paying to be treated in the high manner that he thought he deserved.
And Naaman’s arrogance almost caused him to throw away the gift of healing. It was only the intervention of his wise, humble servants that convinced this pompous man to swallow his pride and follow Elisha’s instructions.
This past Wednesday we saw a man who let his pride go out of control when we looked at King Asa. His dignity took a blow when a prophet rebuked him publically of his sins and called on him to repent. But instead of bowing to the Lord’s will, Asa’s conceit went out of control, and it nearly cost him his faith.
What sort of things are we tempted to be prideful of? How much money you make? The honor that you have on the job? The neighborhood that you live in? How long you’ve been a Christian? The many years you’ve gone to school? The skills that you have? Do you take pride in your ability to live an outwardly more-Christian life than someone else? Pride is a killer, and it sure doesn’t mix with humility. The greatest example of humility that I can think of is our God, Jesus Christ, crawling around on the floor and bathing the filthy, stinking feet of his disciples. Jesus humbled himself so that lowly worms like us would be exalted in realms of heaven! And then Jesus said, “Do you want to say thank you to me for taking away your sins of pride and unbelief? Do you want to say thank you to me for giving you the key to heaven’s door? Do you want to say thank you to me for saving you from the eternal fires of hell? Say thank you by living a humble life as I lived for you. Be prepared to lower yourself even to the point of washing the feet of everyone else.”
There’s a passage that sheds more light on the polar opposites of humility and pride. It goes, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” The proud person is the enemy of God. The humble person is the friend of Jesus.
Conclusion
You and I have only one thing to boast about: we are friends of God! That little girl was able to make that humble, faith-filled boast as she witnessed her faith to her unbelieving masters. And by the grace of God, the Lord really turned Naaman around. The healing of the leprosy, that’s a nice little part of this story. But the real important part is how God filled Naaman up with faith and humility. The disease was a blessing in disguise. Leprosy or no leprosy, Naaman either way would be long dead by now. But he lives on, in heaven. If not for that disease, he never would have felt the need to find the True God. Without his humble slave girl, he never would have heard about the Lord.
When you are tempted to doubt God’s promises, remember that 2-Liter bottle with oil and water not mixing. Neither can your doubt mix with faith! Get rid of it, and have a simple, strong trust that God is going to work everything out. Remember that 2-Liter bottle when you are tempted to think of yourself as an important person. Pride sure doesn’t mix very well with humility. And thank Jesus that he has turned you from being a conceited unbeliever on your way to hell to a humble Christian who has heaven to look forward to! Amen.
sdg
