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.”
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 small 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 missed his healing over the 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. Do the unimpressive thing. The cleansing is far more often in the muddy obedience we are tempted to walk away from than in the spectacle we were holding out for.