NOTES for Ki2 5:1-15

Naaman's reaction is very understandable in human terms. He had been sent to a great prophet and expected great and fearsome deeds from him. Naaman supposed that so great an event as healing from leprosy would be attended by fitting pomp and solemnity. Elisha requires something almost impossible from Naaman: complete trust and complete humility. He does not even come out to meet Naaman himself, but sends a servant. And Naaman storms off in a rage. Interestingly, he agrees to follow Elisha's advice on the principle that "it can do no harm." In other words, at the moment when he immerses himself in the waters of the Jordan, there is not the slightest trace of either trust or humility. Nevertheless, the Lord acts and grants healing, and it is then that Naaman receives God into his heart—the God who does not stage spectacles where they are not needed, but simply shows mercy and saves those who turn to Him.

How much a person wants a miracle, a real one, dropped down from heaven! I am sick, so let healing descend on me. I feel awful, so I urgently need a shoulder to cry on. I have no job, so why should one not simply fall into my lap? What? Dip seven times in the Jordan? Do I not have water at home? What a thing to suggest, and from believers too! I need a miracle. What kind of advice is this: go to a doctor and take the medicine he prescribes; stop whining about yourself and look at others; start looking for work, learn something simpler?

We badly want something for nothing from God. We badly do not want to take disgusting medicine, get up, go, and search. We badly do not want to rejoice. But most often miracles happen only when we do not simply ask to win the lottery, but finally go and buy a lottery ticket.

Why does distrust of God or distrust of a man of God arise in a person? There can be many reasons. But there is one that appears to occur more often than others. The issue is love for everything unusual, extravagant, and striking to the imagination.

It is hardly possible that the Syrian who came to Elisha did not know who prophets were and what could be expected of them. Prophets in those times existed not only among the Jews; there were many of them in the pagan world as well, where they usually spoke in the name of the supreme gods of their pantheons, most often in the name of the sun god or the thunder god. And almost always these prophets either demonstrated certain miracles, often of a quite magical character, or offered those who turned to them participation in rites that were very extravagant even in the eyes of their contemporaries, connected with the service of the gods in whose name and on whose behalf they spoke. But Naaman had heard about the God of the Jews that He was greater than all the gods of other peoples, that He was more powerful and higher than they. And he expected from the prophet of such a God something unusual, something that in his eyes had to correspond to the majesty of the God whose servant Elisha was. Elisha, however, offers him only to wash in the Jordan. To the high-ranking Syrian such a proposal seems mockery: does he not have enough rivers in Syria, and what rivers, not to be compared with this Jordan, which in its upper course in summer looks more like a stream.

But his servants and assistants advise him not to rush: what if? After all, the prophet is a man of God; what he says is in any case worth listening to. What if all this is not mockery at all? This is where the main thing lies. What if? What if the God of this strange prophet will still help? What if the prophet is right?

And Naaman decides. And receives healing. For he did trust the God of Elisha, the God of Israel, though not at once. And such trust never remains unanswered.

From what arises man’s distrust of God or the distrust of the man of God? Probably, the reasons can be many. But there is one that we meet, it seems, mostly than others. It is about love to all which is extraordinary, extravagant, striking imagination. It is hardly that the Syrian who had come to Elisha did not know who the prophets are and what can be expected from them. The prophets in that period were not only among the Jews, they were many in the pagan world, where they usually augured in the name of the supreme gods of their pantheons, mostly on behalf of the sun god or of the thunder god. And almost always these prophets, either, made certain miracles, often of completely magic character, or proposed to those who address to them the participation in very extravagant even in the sight of the contemporaries rites connected with the service of these gods, in the name and in the person of whom they acted.

Naaman thus understood that the God of the Jews is bigger than the gods of the other peoples, that He is more powerful and superior to them. And, certainly, he expected from the prophet of such a God something extraordinary, something that in his eyes had to correspond to the greatness of the God, the servant of whom was Elisha.

Elisha the meantime suggests to him just to wash in the Jordan. Such proposal seems a mockery to the high-ranking Syrian: are the rivers in Syria few for him, and which ones again - this Jordan is nothing, the summer in the upper course it is more similar to the brook! But the servants and aides advise him not to hurry: what if?

Indeed, the prophet is a man of God, what he says at least worth consideration. What if all this was not a joke? And here is the important. What if? If really it is God, Who helped this strange prophet? What if the prophet was right? And Naaman then decides. And he obtains the healing. Because he trusted after all the God of Elisha, the God of Israel, though not immediately. And such trust never remains without answer.

That this is true is beyond doubt: everyone can remember relationships with close relatives. But why is it so? Perhaps because we expect a prophet to be something unusual, almost superhuman, while God gives the gift of prophecy to completely ordinary people. If we do not know such a person closely, then that person is unusual to us and we are ready to take him for a prophet. But in someone close to us, what is unusual? So we easily accept all kinds of ideas that come from outside as prophecies, while our own prophets, all those Vernadskys, Vavilovs, and Solzhenitsyns, we mock, let rot in camps, and drive out of the country. After all, perfect pitch is also a gift, but it does not depend at all on whether we accept it or not; prophecy, however, if it is not heard, is as though it does not exist. And just as well, since a prophet rarely says things pleasant to us!

And now the main question: what should we do with this? The answer must be sought in the Gospel. We are called to love, both the near and the far, seeing in each person the image of God and therefore a mystery that can never be fully comprehended. Then every person is astonishing to us, and through every person God can say something very important to us.

What is said in this verse is indubitably true: each of us can remember his relationship with his most immediate family. Why is it so? May be because we have illusions? We think that a prophet must be extraordinary, even a superman, while God bestows the gift of prophecy to common people. If we don’t know closely the person to whom God bestows the gift of prophecy, then he is for us extraordinary and we are ready to agree that he is a prophet, but what happens when it turns out that this person is close to us, is familiar to us - is there anything abnormal in him that makes him not to be a prophet? Voila! We take easily for prophecy any sorts of ideas coming from outside, but we laugh and let moldy our prophets in camps, we even expel them sometimes out of the country. Is it not an absolute hearing also a gift? But this gift completely doesn’t depend on us - whether we accept it or not - it exists - while the gift of prophecy seems to not exist if it is not heard and received. Oh that’s great, since prophets seldom talk about things that please us, isn’t it?

But here is the main question: what should we do? The answer must be sought in the Gospel. We are summoned to love – our neighbor and stranger, seeing in each the character of God, and this means secret cannot be apprehended till the bottom. So, everyone should be amazing for us, and God might say something very important for us through anyone.

Sometimes the fullness of God's life in Jesus manifests itself unusually and unexpectedly. The crowd is ready to seize Him, but He somehow passes through it. Either unnoticed or invulnerable. Or perhaps both together. The evangelist does not explain exactly how He manages to pass through the aggressive crowd. Most likely, He simply passed right beside it.

Moving in another dimension, in another space, in the space of His Kingdom, which was never closed to Him, even when outwardly He was no different from other people. They did not see Him not because He used some special methods of hiding Himself, like a fairy-tale cap of invisibility, but because He moved where His pursuers could not penetrate, even though they continued to see Him.

Somewhat as, after His resurrection, He was visible to His disciples walking to Emmaus while being in the Kingdom, whose boundary with the untransformed world ran along the very road on which they were walking, so that He was on one side of the boundary and they on the other. Once He moved away from the boundary into the depths of the Kingdom, He vanished from the apostles' eyes. Yet near the boundary He could be seen even by those who had not yet entered the Kingdom. So too the crowd could see Him without entering His Kingdom. But to touch Him, to seize Him, was impossible.

Such invulnerability seems strange against the background of everything that happened later, when He was nevertheless arrested, tried, and executed. If He could become invulnerable to the crowd then, what kept Him from doing the same later? Technically, nothing. The words He spoke in the Garden of Gethsemane about legions of angels were not an allegory at all; they were a statement of fact, an indication of a fully real possibility, which, however, He could use only if He decided to violate the will of His heavenly Father.

There was nothing forced or inevitable in Jesus' life in the sense in which such things exist for us. His life was determined only by His choice and by the decisions of His Father, which He accepted and perceived as His own. He could not avoid going to the cross not because He had nowhere to go, but because otherwise He would not have carried out what He came into the world to do. But then, in Nazareth, it was still too early for Him to die. And He left. He left the crowd, walking by the road of His Kingdom. The road that, passing through our fallen world, then helped Him avoid the hands of a hostile crowd. And later led Him to the cross.

The Lord comes to the one to whom He Himself wants to come. God's coming into a person's life is not a reward for one merit or another, whether ascetic feats or perfect piety. The Lord comes to those who need it as a matter of life and death. But there are many who are in need. Or does He choose the most humiliated among them? Perhaps that applies in some measure to the widow of Zarephath in Sidon, but hardly to the commander of the Syrian king's army. So the Lord chooses in some way unknown to human beings. No one will ever find a pattern here. The Lord is living, and everything living cannot be fully fitted into laws. For us, however, law is the mind's only support, the only thing that gives us any confidence. Yet that very confidence is what fails us. How sure the people of Nazareth were that they knew, knew well, this man, Jesus. But that confidence kept them from seeing God in Him.

We should not think that the Lord is somehow playing with us, or simply trying to surprise us, because everything here is far too serious. Human lives are at stake. Of course, that is not what this is about. It is simply that we, precisely we, do not understand God's providence or the whole complexity of His ways. "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, says the Lord" (Isa 55:8). This mismatch is what sometimes makes us wonder why grace came down on this particular person, why in just this way, just at this time, when it is obvious to us that there are people around who are much more worthy or more needy. We simply have to try to believe that everything that happens by His will happens in the way most needed for the paths of grace.

In Christ the prophecy was fulfilled. But whom is it speaking about? It is still possible to understand why healing is given to the broken, release to captives, and sight to the blind. But why is joy promised only to the poor, and freedom only to the oppressed? And what does that have to do with me? Of course, I am sometimes oppressed, but not all the time!

It is no wonder that not everyone in the synagogue reacted properly... Or should we still try to reread this passage once more and try to enter into the meaning of these words, to discover in ourselves the need, the thirst for freedom and healing? Otherwise Jesus will have to go to another town again...

Today's reading prompts us to reflect on the truth expressed in a well-known saying whose Gospel origin, however, is far from universally known today: no prophet is accepted in his own country (v. 24). By quoting a messianic passage from the Book of Isaiah, Jesus quite plainly identifies Himself as the One of whom the prophet spoke (vv. 17-21). At first glance, His listeners' reaction seems paradoxical: on the one hand they agree with Jesus, but on the other they immediately begin to doubt. How could their fellow townsman, whom they had known since childhood, make any claim to be the Messiah (v. 22)? They demand miracles from Him not as signs of the Kingdom but as proof of His messiahship (v. 23). It is then that Jesus speaks the bitter words about a prophet in his own country (v. 24).

Yet the paradoxical reaction of Jesus' listeners was actually quite understandable, and not merely because “great things are best seen from a distance.” The issue here was ordinary familiarity, which often proves to be one of the most serious obstacles on the spiritual path. Their doubts are justified, not by chance, with the thought that they have known Him since childhood: “Is not this Joseph's son?” So how could there be any question of messiahship? Of course, if Jesus had been recognized by respected people or official authorities and they had directly identified Him as the Messiah, He would undoubtedly have been welcomed with joy and celebrated as a famous fellow townsman. But there was no official recognition, and the townspeople had to decide for themselves. The force of habit weighed upon them.

Fallen human beings tend to see reality not as it is but as they are accustomed to seeing it. Clichés are common and widespread, and they arise for a reason: reducing reality to patterns and using ready-made models to describe it form a kind of psychological mechanism by which human beings adapt to the world—a mechanism without which, after the Fall, they can no longer manage. Yet this same adaptive mechanism often prevents a person from seeing what is new and unusual. It offers ready-made patterns and models where they do not apply, where the realities involved fit no pattern and can be described by no model.

The Kingdom to which Jesus bears witness is just such a reality. It fits no familiar framework. Yet Jesus' fellow townspeople do not want to lose that framework; they are prepared to defend it at any cost, and Jesus simply will not fit within it: an unrecognized Messiah, a disturber of the peace, someone passing Himself off as no one knows whom and claiming what no one in their small town had ever claimed or would ever have dared to claim. This is how He appeared to the people of Nazareth. They were left with only one remedy: to rid themselves of their excessively troublesome fellow townsman. And they would have done so if they could (vv. 28-30).

As we can see, it is not only the hatred of religious rigorists and the maneuvering of politicians that lead Jesus to the cross. He is driven there also by the narrowness of fallen human nature.

In the ancient world, “to proclaim good news” meant bringing news of victory over an enemy. By choosing this word to describe His mission, Jesus tells His astonished fellow townspeople that God has sent Him as a herald of His victory, of the coming of His eternal Kingdom. But He goes beyond referring to the biblical prophecy—and this is especially shocking to His listeners: when quoting Isaiah, Jesus omits the words about “the vengeance of our God” (Isa 61:2) and denies the Israelites' superiority over the Gentiles in the coming Kingdom. In addition to victory over the forces of evil, manifested in the healing of the possessed man, Christ brings news of victory over vengeance and hatred. This victory was won by the Lord Jesus Himself and must be won by everyone who wishes to be His disciple.

The problem of insiders and outsiders has always existed, in every society and every culture. Everywhere and always it has turned out that it is better to be an insider than an outsider. But then the Messiah came into the world, and it turned out that everything was not so simple. It turned out that an insider is not necessarily someone we know. Most often it is someone we think we know. And this is understandable: we perceive our own people as part of the familiar and known world. There is no need to look closely at them, and no need to listen carefully to their words. In general, we already know more or less what our own people can tell us.

Outsiders are another matter. An outsider is always someone you do not know. Someone who is not part of the known and familiar world, and here it does not matter where he is from: another continent or the neighboring village. Outsiders are often rejected, but they are always looked at closely. People listen to what they say. Not necessarily in a friendly way, but always attentively. After all, an outsider has to be understood. Or at least explained to oneself. Explanation is often an illusion of understanding. Understanding presupposes the perception of another person as he is. Explanation begins when we perceive this other person as we want to see him, so that he will fit within the bounds of our perception of the world familiar and known to us.

Christ can and must be accepted as He is. And He can and must be understood too - also as He is. But He does not need to be explained. Not to ourselves and not to others. Provided, of course, that we want to communicate with Christ and not with our images of Christ. And here it turns out that it is easier for those to whom He is an outsider. They know nothing about Him. His own people also know nothing about Him, but they think they know everything. Unlike outsiders, who at least are not mistaken about their ignorance. And it is this way not only with Him.

It is this way with God too. With His heavenly Father. It is no accident that Jesus gives examples from ancient Jewish history of God's not being recognized by His own people. A failure to recognize Him that separates people from God. And from the Messiah too. For God or the Messiah to begin to act, a person must want it. And must turn directly to God. Directly to Christ. But not to those images of God or Christ that he has invented for himself. Otherwise even the Kingdom may turn out to be unreal. Imagined. And so may life in it.