The unimpressive cure
Naaman at the Jordan
Naaman is a great man, and he arrives for his healing the way a great man would: horses, chariots, a fortune in silver and gold, and a fully formed picture of how this should go. The prophet will surely stride out, call on the name of his God, sweep a hand over the diseased skin, and the leprosy will lift. A ceremony fit for a commander. What he gets instead is a messenger at the door with one instruction: go, wash in the Jordan seven times.
No prophet emerges. No hand is waved. Just a muddy river and a chore, and Naaman is furious. He had expected something, and the plainness of it offends him to his core. Are not the rivers of Damascus better than all the waters of Israel? He turns to go in a rage, ready to carry his disease home rather than stoop to anything so unimpressive. His servants talk him down. If the prophet had asked some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more when he says only, wash, and be clean. So he goes down and dips, seven times, and on the seventh his flesh comes back like the flesh of a little child, and he is clean.
“I thought, He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the LORD his God, and wave his hand over the place, and heal the leprosy.”
— Naaman, the Syrian commander — 2 Kings 5:11 (WEB)
“He dipped himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the saying of the man of God; and his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean.”
This is Disorientation as offended expectation, the wilderness where God will not work the way we scripted. The phase asks us to lay down the dramatic deliverance we imagined and stoop to the plain, unglamorous instruction in front of us. It tests whether we will despise the muddy means, or go down and wash, and be made clean.
Part of your disorientation may be that God will not work the way you scripted it. Part of the disorientation is the offense of the remedy. We brace for God to do something commensurate with our pain, something dramatic enough to match how hard this has been, and instead the instruction that comes is small, plain, almost insulting in its modesty. Forgive the person. Tell the truth. Go to the gathering. Keep the little obedience you have been despising. It feels too ordinary to touch anything as large as what we are carrying, and like Naaman we are tempted to turn and go home still sick rather than stoop to it.
But the cleansing was in the river he scorned. Naaman nearly forfeited his healing over exactly that gap between the cure he wanted and the cure he was given, and the gap was entirely his pride. The wilderness has a way of stripping the ceremony off our expectations and leaving the humble means God actually uses. So do the unimpressive thing. The cleansing is far more often in the muddy obedience you are tempted to walk away from than in the spectacle you were holding out for.
The Church grows impatient for God to act impressively, longing for a sweeping revival or a spectacular cultural turn, and despises the ordinary means He actually offers: repentance, faithfulness, the slow recovery of small obediences, the muddy Jordan of unglamorous work. Naaman warns the whole Body against missing its own cleansing because the cure was not grand enough for its pride. The great renewals of history have rarely come down as the spectacle the watching world expected; they came through unglamorous means a depleted Church was tempted to scorn, the reading of Scripture, the recovery of prayer, ordinary people obeying plain words. When the institutions stand discredited and Christianity longs for a dramatic reversal to vindicate it, the cleansing waits where it always has, in the humble obedience the Body keeps walking away from.
What cannot be shaken is not the spectacle we wanted but the LORD whose word does the cleansing, however plain the means. The grand picture Naaman imagined was shakable and had to go. The simple word, go and wash, remained, and it held the healing. Strip away the ceremony and the working word is still there.
- What dramatic deliverance am I holding out for that is keeping me from a plain obedience?
- Where has the plainness of God's instruction offended my pride?
- What is the muddy Jordan I keep walking away from, and what if the cleansing is in it?
Lord, I confess I wanted a spectacle, and the plain thing You have asked offends me. Forgive the pride that nearly walks away still sick. Give me Naaman's late humility to go down and wash in the river I scorned, trusting that Your cleansing lives in the humble means I despised. Make me clean. Amen.