Psalm 147:1-12, 20c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Mark 1:29-39
Two healings this morning. One in the second book of Kings, one in the gospel of Mark. Two men suffering from leprosy, both afflicted by the same dreaded disease, and yet such different people — living in different times and places, and coming from very different social positions. The first, Naaman, is a successful army commander, a great man in favour with his master the king of Aram. The second is nameless. The writer of Mark tells us nothing about him, not his name or position. More likely than not, he was one of the many outcasts of Jewish society who lived by begging; a person dependent completely on the goodwill and alms of others. Two lepers who plead to God for healing, and yet two such different men who plead in such different ways. Naaman gets his master the King of Aram to send a messenger to the king of Israel, for he has heard that in Israel there is a man of God who could cure him of his leprosy. The nameless leper in the gospel does not have the power or social connections which provide him with intermediaries. He must approach Jesus directly, and, having nothing to recommend him except his humility and straightforwardness, says to Jesus, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Two lepers who ask for the same thing — to be made clean, but who expect that cleansing to come in such different ways. Naaman expects magic — the prophet Elisha coming out and waving his hands over him in an obvious display of power. The leper in Mark, trusting the person of Jesus and the encounter with him to be restorative, expects that Jesus knows best. ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’(Mark 1.40) The question for us becomes, ‘What kind of God do we believe in?’ Do we believe in a God of magic or a God of relationship; a God who panders to our old ways of thinking and doing, or a God who really does make all things new?
How often do we come to God with a plan instead a prayer? We come to God and while we may may say that we are asking for a way forward, the truth is we have invented our own way forward. What we really want is for God to approve our plan so that our resolution will be realised, and realised the way we want it to be. We must awaken ourselves to the reality that prayer is not is not magic spell or a program pitch. Like Naaman, we so often want God to behave according to our expectations and fulfill our limited desires. Naaman does not want a relationship with God, he wants the benefits which come from, what he perceives to be, God’s power. He does not come to God because he loves God, but because he has heard that this Yahweh, this God of Israel — working through the prophet Elisha — is powerful. He does not know God, but as an army commander he does know power — what it looks like and how it works. His expectations of power and certainly of divine power require signs, wonders and extraordinary happenings; and yet the demands of the Lord are simple: that he go wash in the Jordan. You can almost understand his amazement and even anger; in fact, he is only cured because his servants step in and convince him that he should do as Elisha has said.
Naaman has not understood the God of Israel or how that God works in the world. Although powerful, the God of Israel does not work out of power, but out of compassion; and compassion needs genuine encounter to be born and genuine relationship to grow. When that nameless leper in Mark’s gospel comes to Jesus, we are not told that Jesus is moved to heal him by power or authority, but that he is moved with pity, compassion or (as one translator rendered the Greek) “he is filled with tenderness”. Likewise the leper because he has no one to carry his messages or run his errands, must approach Jesus himself. He must look Jesus in the face and acknowledge Jesus not as someone he can manipulate with magic words or as some being whom he must coerce to exercise power on his behalf, but as a person with whom he must actually engage and whose autonomy as a fellow human being he must honour. That is why he says, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ This simple prayer, which does not colonise Jesus with expectations and prejudices as to how he will act, recognises and honours Jesus as a person and thereby initiates relationship; and Jesus also behaves in a way which affirms relationship, by looking on the broken man with compassion, by touching him with tenderness, by entering into this man’s situation and suffering his pain with him. (That is what ‘compassion’ means: co passio: ‘suffering with’). It is within this dialogue of vulnerability that real healing can occur, and not just the healing of the body. The cleansing of the leper integrates him back into the community: ‘go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded.’(Mark 1.44) The encounter with Jesus has not brought only physical healing but real integration for this one who had been cast out from the community. While we may find in this story a miracle, we find no magic or magical thinking. God’s longing to make ‘all things new’ is made manifest and effected in vulnerability, encounter and relationship.
We have here then two models of prayer, two models of encounter with God. The first seems to me is about colonising God with our expectations, the other has to do with taking the risk of entering into genuine relationship with God. Had Naaman not been healed through Elisha, he would have simply gone on looking for some other wonder-worker who could cast the right spell; someone whose god was more powerful. He just was not looking for relationship with God, he just didn’t think in those terms. The leper took the risk of coming to Jesus; because he had no power or status behind which to hide he brought all of himself in vulnerability.
The Church teaches us, as the Book of Common Prayer says, ‘to make prayers and supplications,’ but prayers are not magic words by which we can manipulate God to do what we want in the way we want it done. It is much more subtle and yes, powerful than that. At its core prayer is about entering into relationship with God. And real relationship with God, as with anyone, is not about manipulating the other to get him or her to do what we want, nor is it about colonising the other with our ideas of who we want them to be. It is about allowing the other to be the other, as they are, in our lives. Neither is real relationship about hiding behind the trappings of power and authority by which the world defines us and by which we often define ourselves. In real relationship no intermediaries will do. We ourselves must bring our selves to the encounter. When we do that with God, when we commit ourselves to relationship with God then real miracles can begin to happen. When we take God seriously enough to let God be who God is and wants to be in our lives it is then that transformation can happen, it is then when we can talk about being redeemed. Naaman was cured, but was he transformed?
When it comes to God, do we want magic or do we want relationship? Magic cannot ultimately save, because even if we get what we want we will probably remain trapped in our own self-centred and limiting point-of-view. That is not salvation. Only real relationship and relatedness can redeem, because real relationship, whether with God or with anyone, calls us out of ourselves. It is only when we come to the other in openness with all we have, like the leper in Mark, that we can really be touched and truly be made clean.
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