“Then He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and He went into the synagogue there, as His custom was, on the sabbath day, and stood up to read; the book given to Him was the book of the prophet Isaias; so He opened it, and found the place where the words ran, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me; he has anointed me, and sent me out to preach the gospel to the poor, to restore the broken-hearted; to bid the prisoners go free, and the blind have sight; to set the oppressed at liberty, to proclaim a year when men may find acceptance with the Lord, a day of retribution.’ Then He shut the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. All those who were in the synagogue fixed their eyes on Him, and thus He began speaking to them, ‘This scripture which I have read in your hearing is today fulfilled.’ All bore testimony to Him, and were astonished at the gracious words which came from His mouth; ‘Why,’ they said, ‘is not this the son of Joseph?’ Then He said to them, ‘No doubt you will tell me, as the proverb says, Physician, heal thyself; do here in thy own country all that we have heard of thy doing at Capharnaum.’ And He said, ‘Believe me, no prophet finds acceptance in his own country. Why, you may be sure of this, there were many widows among the people of Israel in the days of Elias, when a great famine came over all the land, after the heavens had remained shut for three years and six months, but Elias was not sent to any of these. He was sent to a widow woman in Sarepta, which belongs to Sidon. And there were many lepers among the people of Israel in the days of the prophet Eliseus; but it was none of them, it was Naaman the Syrian, who was made clean.‘ All those who were in the synagogue were full of indignation at hearing this; they rose up and thrust Him out of the city, and took Him up to the brow of the hill on which their city was built, to throw Him over it. But He passed through the midst of them, and so went on His way.”
Gospel of S. Luke, 4: 16-30 [link]
It must not be forgotten how revolutionary Christ and His Apostles were being in advocating for the entry of non-Jews, of Gentiles, into the greatly-cherished promises that God had once made to Abraham and to his descendants. As above, in His very hometown, in Nazareth, the locals were surprised that the carpenter’s son had become a sage and a Torah-teacher, but they were outraged about His love of those foreigners, and tried to chuck Him over a cliff. And yet, as we said in refrain to our psalm this weekend, the Lord has shown His salvation to the Gentiles. The Nazareth story tells us that when the Jew refuses to believe, the Gentile often does. This was the experience of Christ, and also of His Apostles in the immediate history of the Church, after Pentecost, when for example the Samaritans were among the earliest to enter the Christian community.
We don’t hear enough about the prophet Elisha (aka. Eliseus), the disciple of the greater prophet Elijah, who is one of two Old Testament characters who never died. Elisha did die, but even that didn’t stop him working miracles. When his body brought somebody else back to life, we were given an odd window into the Hebrew use of the relics of Saints. So, Elisha, who had craved a greater share even than his master Elijah’s power over nature, unsurprisingly became an extraordinary miracle man. This weekend, in our first reading, we have one of the stories of his miracles, when he heals the illness of this Syrian soldier Naaman.
“Naaman came with his horses and his chariots, and stood at the door of Eliseus’ house; where Eliseus sent word out to him, ‘Go and bathe seven times in the Jordan, if thou wouldst have health restored to thy flesh, and be clean.’ At this, Naaman was for going back home; ‘Why,’ he said angrily, ‘I thought he would come out to meet me, and stand here invoking the name of his God; that he would touch the sore with his hand, and cure me. Has not Damascus its rivers, Abana and Pharphar, such water as is not to be found in Israel? Why may I not bathe and find healing there?’ But, as he turned indignantly to go away, his servants came and pleaded with him; ‘Good father,’ they said, ‘if the prophet had enjoined some great task on thee, thou wouldst surely have performed it; all the more readily thou shouldst obey him when he says, Wash and thou shalt be clean.’ So down he went, and washed in the Jordan seven times, as the servant of God had bidden him. And with that, his flesh healed up, and became like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean. So, coming back with all his retinue, he stood there in the presence of God’s servant; ‘I have learned,’ he said, ‘past doubt, that there is no God to be found in all the world, save here in Israel. And now,’ he said, ‘pray accept a gift from thy servant, to prove his gratitude!’ ‘As the Lord I serve is a living God,’ Eliseus answered, ‘I will accept nothing from thee;’ nor would any pleading bring him to consent. At last Naaman said, ‘Have thy way, then, lord prophet, but grant me a gift instead. Let me take away with me part of the soil of Israel, as much as two mules can carry; my burnt-sacrifice, my offerings henceforward are for the Lord only, and for no alien god.'”
The fourth book of the Kings (aka. the second book of the Kings), 5: 9-17 [link]
This story is even more significant because Christ Himself mentions it in the gospels (see above), when He seeks to remind His Jewish listeners that, in their opposition to the entry of non-Jewish people into the promises of Abraham, they were forgetting that God had in the past blessed several non-Jews. Naaman was one of those figures in the Hebrew Bible. That is the first point to be made about this story. The God Who had blessed the race of the Hebrews – the race of Abraham – was seen by ancient people as the God of Israel, in particular. Why would He assist non-Hebrews?
However, this is a common feature of the Old Testament, and in the book of Jonah, we hear of a Hebrew prophet who is sent on the mission to the Assyrian city of Nineveh – one of the largest cities of the time, and a Gentile city – the people of which repent of their sin and are forgiven by God – by the God of the Hebrews. These stories are used by Christ in the gospels to demonstrate that the time had arrived for Gentiles – non-Jewish people – to enter the Church.
And that is double good-news for us, who are not of the race of the Jews: first, God has become man and salvation has come to humanity, second, this salvation is not only for the chosen people of God, the Jews, but for everybody who approaches the Holy One in faith and humility. We can all be Naaman the Syrian.
So, then, God heals everybody who approaches Him in faith. Even in the Old Testament. The other point in this story is the illness, given here as leprosy. The isolation of sufferers of a variety of diseases called leprosy, to prevent contagion, is one of the oldest stipulations in the Old Testament. Get them out of the camp of Israel, keep them out of the camp, they are ostracised until the disease is confirmed by the priests to have been somehow healed (we see that in the gospel story this weekend, below). If you can imagine it, this created a second society of sick people who lived at a distance from the main community of Israel. And this would have persisted until very recently, when modern medicine began to treat such diseases adequately. There still are leper colonies in some places, and the Church has a significant outreach to these poor men and women, social outcasts today, as they would have been always. The great general Naaman is about to lose all his occupation and all his society, as well as his personal health.
And when we talk about disease in the Bible, we must talk also about the spiritual contagion of sin, which in our formerly-Christian countries historically created spiritual pariahs and necessitated important taboos, some of which persist in our more godless times. We may see that as a negative feature of the history of our countries, but the Church has in the past tried harder to preach an ethics based on virtue, and to create a truly Christian society. Shall we look down on our forebears for that?
“A time came when He was on His way to Jerusalem, and was passing between Samaria and Galilee; and as He was going into a village, ten men that were lepers came towards him; they stood far off, crying aloud, ‘Jesus, Master, have pity on us.’ He met them with the words, ‘Go and shew yourselves to the priests;’ and thereupon, as they went, they were made clean. One of them, finding that he was cured, came back, praising God aloud, and threw himself at Jesus’ feet with his face to the ground, to thank Him; and this was a Samaritan. Jesus answered, ‘Were not all ten made clean? And the other nine, where are they? Not one has come back to give God the praise, except this stranger.’ And He said to him, ‘Arise and go on thy way, thy faith has brought thee recovery.'”
Gospel of S. Luke, 17: 11-19 [link]
If we begin with the Jewish society of the first century, we know how some serious social sins, such as adultery and tax-collecting, created ostracisms as serious as that reserved for the lepers. Sin was quite a spiritual leprosy. When the ten lepers approach our Lord in this gospel story, let us then think of ourselves in their place. Every one of us who is locked into a cycle of addition or of habitual sin needs healing, and needs healing from Christ.
In these evil days the worst of the sins in the Bible have been normalised to the extent that any Christian mission work usually falls on deaf ears. Nothing we say today can convince many people that adultery/fornication, or dishonesty/theft, or even the murder of little babies in the womb and the enabling of suicide is wrong. We live in a society of spiritual lepers, most of it composed here of nominal Christians who can no longer countenance the teaching of either Moses in the Old Testament or of Christ in the New.
And that’s fair enough, perhaps. We have suffered very much in recent decades as a society in hearing the Gospel that our ancestors heard, we have suffered from a lack of adequate catechesis, we have had our moral senses dulled by an endless media narrative that seeks to minimise the Christian heritage of our countries and supplant it with a relativism that creates a market for multiple religions of equal value. That distances people from the Creator God, just as much as the ancient Syria of Naaman was, and the ancient Assyria of Jonah’s story.
But there is a glimmer of hope for a people distanced from Christ. The Church in this country is not what it was, but there is a light within her, and a great power. And a name – the name of the Ancient One, the Creator of all things. Naaman heard that there was possible healing in Israel, and came looking for Elisha. A Jewish leper of the first century knew to look for the miracle worker from Nazareth. And today quite every man and woman knows of His Church, and if they have not it is because we have failed to tell them about it. The one great job Christ gave His Church was evangelisation, and we are to inform this world we live in of the power of Christ, of where He is to be found, and how people who desire healing are to find Him.
And He will bless us all alike for our faith, Jew and non-Jew, Christians and non-Christian, and free us from our slavery to sin.
Catholic Louth and Mablethorpe 