On the surface, today’s readings continue the healing story from last week. From the Gettysburg Address back in history to the Gospel of Mark, to the Hebrew songbook, and beginning with the historical work of the author of 2nd Kings, we hear repeatedly that God can heal, God will heal, God does heal. Yet underneath this most obvious message of God as healer, is another, more poignant one…a message that clarifies and defines “healing” in a way that brings comfort even to those whose diseases are not cured and whose severe health conditions remain unaltered. Each of our readings today define healing as “wholeness,” “peace,” “calmness,” even “acceptance.” The Hebrew word used for this condition, in which the disease may continue to rage, but the person is at peace, is the word shalom.
We hear the sentiments of shalom in the story of Naaman, the leprous commander of the army of the King of Aram, a people that had decisively beaten the Hebrews on the battlefield. Naaman is ill, but more than illness, Naaman is afflicted with a super-sized ego that prevents him from seeing the healing pathways that are right in front of him. Consequently, at the beginning of the story, he has trouble listening to his servants as they tell him about the Hebrew healer; later, when he dutifully shows up at the Hebrew king’s abode with a note from his king to theirs and is told to go and see Elisha the healer, who doesn’t even show Naaman the courtesy of a handshake but instead tells him through a messenger to go and wash in the dirty Jordan River, well, Naaman is righteously angry. He is, after all, a person who has the king’s favor. He is accustomed to yelling “jump” and having people respond with “how high?” His ego, inflated to fill his important position, is the more diseased part of him that sinks into the muddy Jordan that day.
According to one commentary writer, the healing of Naaman can be understood in terms of God’s passion for wholeness, for shalom. Naaman’s healing arises, in part, from his listening to the counsel of his servants and slaves, those who were socially beneath him. Sickness is the great equalizer, awakening us to receive help from any source, even those we previously disparaged or treated as inferiors. Naaman comes to realize that the healing he needs will not result from complex rituals or great expense, but from the simple act of dipping into the humble Jordan River. We can imagine that when he dips into the river seven times as instructed by the healer Elisha, and comes out with, as scripture notes, his flesh restored like the flesh of a young boy and clean, it was more than flesh that experienced shalom.
Naaman’s shalom, the wholeness needed in his life, went far beyond the physical illness of leprosy. As is often true for us, when Naaman followed the simple steps outlined for healing to occur, using resources that were easily accessible, shalom was his gift. In the next part of the story, which we did not read this morning, Naaman runs, excitedly, after the healer Elisha, falls at his feet in an attitude of submission, and proclaims loudly for all his servants to hear, “The God of Israel is the real deal!” He tries to pay Elisha for his services, but Elisha vehemently declines…you see, shalom has no price tag that can be paid in gold or silver. Naaman is instructed once again to go his way in peace, in other words, he is told to go and live out his life, keeping circumspect about the healing, and quietly peaceful about his new-found shalom. Keeping a secret…that is Naaman’s implied instruction.
I am reminded of our own Nancy Nelson, who, about a month before she passed away, and on the day before she was expecting the final verdict and timeline for death from her oncologist, resolutely said to me, “Sharon, I want you to assemble a healing team…” “But Nancy…” the words formed in my mind, and thankfully stopped before coming out my mouth… She must have read the dubious look on my face, for she continued naming those people who were healers for her. As she did, it became clear that she knew she was dying. She was very sure that no medical treatment would prolong her life…there would be no cure for her cancer. Yet, in the midst of that raging battle, Nancy called for healing, for wholeness, for shalom. No secret here at the bedside…Nancy challenged a group of people to participate with her in her healing before she died.
So also did the leprous man in the gospel reading this morning. Ched Myers—writer, professor, and author of Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus—wrote some 20 years ago that this passage is steeped in the same first-century health care system we talked about last Sunday. You may recall that it was a system that blamed people for their disease, believing that all illness was a result of some sin in the sick one’s life. If a person was born with a defect, became visibly diseased, or their body didn’t function correctly, then they were legally unclean. Theirs was a situation for the priests, not the doctors. The priests, who were the keepers of the system, then were allowed to charge embarrassingly high prices for cures that, if they didn’t work, cycled back around to blaming the ill person for not removing their own hidden sin.
Though schooled in this system, Jesus deviated from it. While Jesus recognized a person’s role in health, illness, and spiritual growth, on no occasion did Jesus blame the victim for her or his ailment. Illness, according to Jesus, was an opportunity for healing rather than for judgment, guilt, or blame.
Ched Myers claims that, in this passage from Mark, Jesus is righteously angry. The word often translated “pity” (as in “Jesus was moved with pity”) is more accurately translated “Jesus was angry.” He was angry at a system that, increasingly, sought profit on the back of human pain and suffering. He was angry that such a system was parading itself as sacred, as within the realm of the priests and religious leaders to control and manipulate. He was angry, perhaps, that the crowds gathering around him for free health care, were, as one commentary author rightly describes, “more audience than congregation.” In his anger, Jesus hastily turns toward the leprous man, and snorts with indignation at the multiple injustices.
The leper is, as one commentary author dramatically describes, living as “a corpse haunting the edges of the community he could no longer enter.” The man approaches Jesus as a supplicant, begging and kneeling, but then makes a statement rather than a request. “You can heal me…if you choose.” It is as if the leper knows he is violating the codes of priestly prerogative by approaching Jesus rather than the priests, by asking Jesus to pronounce him clean. It’s almost as if the leprous man said “If you dare”…and Jesus takes the dare. Once again, in his healing, in his offering of shalom, of wholeness to an ill person, Jesus risks his safety by spitting in the face of a system that sought to manipulate and benefit from the pain of the vulnerable.
Graydon Snyder, contributor to The Lectionary Commentary, reminds us that “in Hebrew thought compassion comes from the guts.” So Jesus felt something powerful, something physical, when he looked at this man, an emotion better translated, as “Jesus felt his stomach turn.” That this was no gentle healing, no “balm in Gilead,” is indicated by other phrases in the text translated as “sternly warning,” and “sent him away at once.”
In fact, another commentary contributor, Stephen L. Cook, notes that the verb for “sent away” is also used in other passages for expelling demons. Cook sees in this cleansing a much bigger picture, a picture of “God’s messianic rebirthing of God’s covenant community. Like the victim in the lesson, all of us stand unclean and excluded from real intimacy with the Holy One and with each other….The good news of the gospel, however, is that God is reversing all our estrangement.” Here in the first chapter of his Gospel, Mark’s Jesus is already doing the things that will create tension between him and the religious authorities of his day. The new redeeming work of God in Jesus is paving a broad, inclusive road. Upon it, God is drawing all redeemed people back home. God, Cook says, is “washing clean all the children, soaking out all our muck and scrubbing it away.” His words remind us that what happens in this story is more a cleansing than a healing, and more relational than individual, as the man’s shalom gives him a pass back into community life.
Ironically, as the leper is restored to his community, Jesus himself becomes a kind of leper, banished from community, in a sense, by his own popularity, by the overwhelming needs of the people, and perhaps by the already-building tension between him and the priests. It’s no wonder that he tries to keep things quiet by telling the now-clean man not to tell anyone what has happened. “Shhhh…please keep this a secret between you and I…” pleads Jesus to the man.
By contrast with the end of Mark’s gospel story when, at the open and empty tomb, the followers are given a commission to tell others the good news, but instead they run into hiding, here the Gospel begins with a leper who is warned not to tell but does. The warning of Jesus to keep quiet is useless. The excited man spills the beans to any and all who will hear…his healing, his shalom is a secret not worth keeping.
Like Naaman and the leprous man who challenged Jesus to be Jesus, we, too, are in need of shalom, healing, wholeness. Out of fear we fail to do and say what would offer hope to another. Out of busy-ness—that innocuous excuse for personal choice and individual decision-making—we fill our lives with tasks that lead away from shalom and that isolate us from the community we need and needs us. In our own lives, often the tools for healing are right in front of us—a change of diet or lifestyle or exercise, an improvement in relationship, time for spiritual discipline and deepening spiritual practice. Usually, the finding of shalom is not particularly complicated. What we need, despite whatever diagnosis we may be carrying, is to follow the uncomplicated—but not necessarily easy—steps of healing and wholeness to experience new life, or recovery, or peace of mind.
While these passages beg to be read as statements of personal healing, they also speak of community transformation, of shalom that extends from individuals to effect the whole polis. They are, like it or not, political passages.
We see the community, the polis, the political implications of these passages in the contrast between compassion and anger driving today’s gospel reading. Both anger and compassion are relational emotions; both arise from a strong sense of connection either with others or on behalf of others. Like the Jesus we seek to follow, our compassion for others inspires righteous anger toward unjust social systems and the ongoing perpetuation of racist, sexist, and gender-related stereotypes. As with Jesus, this prophetic indignation inspires us to imagine and then to risk as we enact alternatives to current unjust and harmful state of affairs, whether in a family, a congregation, a community, or a nation.
If we are tempted to keep our faith personal, that is, a private relationship with Jesus that changes our lives on the inside, that is not enough. Author and preacher Fred Craddock writes: “To reduce the ministry of Jesus and the ministry of the church to some inner change in the soul is just that, a reduction.” We need one another, a community of faith, in which we can better understand who Jesus is, and what that means in our lives; from one another we learn what it will cost to follow Jesus faithfully. We’re called to serve and heal and make whole, to restore and rebuild and reach out…and no one of us can do that in isolation.
We certainly see the political—the community—implications of healing in the story of Naaman. Here is a reflection of shalom that brings together two sworn enemies, with hatreds and resentments that run deep. Here is shalom expressed in a most shocking way through completely unexpected means. Here is shalom that restores Naaman to his family, to his post, and to his community, while also offering him a new way of thinking about “the other.”
We see the political implications of healing also in the words of the psalmist, who describes God’s behavior in relationship to our illnesses and isolation. Yes, we hear encouraging, upbeat affirmations, such as “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes in the morning” or “You have turned my mourning into dancing.” The psalmist gives equal time to the ambiguous nature of certain theologies of health and illness that would blame the victim and punish them by an angry God. While praising God for God’s restorative power in human life, the psalmist notes the other side of divine power, in phrases such as “For God’s anger is but for moment, God’s favor is a for a lifetime” or “you hid your face and I was dismayed.” The psalmist’s final lament “What profit is there in my death? Will the dust that was my body praise you?” is a reflection of the psalmist’s own uncertainty about God’s consistency, care, and moral nature. Can God be depended upon when the going gets tough? When the illness is consuming? When the relationship seems doomed? When the isolation leads to despair? When shalom is a pipe dream and healing far off? Can God be depended upon to accompany us?
Today’s passages call us to affirm God’s commitment to health and wholeness, God’s desire for all to flourish, and God’s desire for us to take part in that healing. While the reality of sickness will always be a factor, God is moving through our lives to bring wholeness, beauty, and love. At times, the return to health may involve discomfort and pain, such as recovery from surgery and chemotherapy, on the one hand, and release from addictions and addictive behaviors, on the other. But, scripture assures us that God does not withdraw, withhold, or punish us. God is always on our side and will do whatever it takes, within the context of God’s ability to shape our lives, to support our healing and wholeness. Our task at every stage of life is to be God’s partners in this quest for shalom, for wholeness in our own lives, in the lives of others, and shalom, wholeness across the globe.
In our quest for shalom, we may well rehearse in word and deed those passionate words of President Abraham Lincoln, who while facing the battlefield of a civil war that raged on and threatened to undo all of the union thus far realized, spoke eloquently of life, of death, and of life resurrected.
“It is for us, the living…to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
For Naaman, for the leprous man who challenged Jesus, and even for our beloved America, shalom catches us and changes us for the better…And that, my shalom-needing sisters and brothers, is a secret not worth keeping!
