• II Kings 5: 1-14

Powerful men, large egos, a humiliating stigma, a self-effacing representative of God, and, finally a deeply moving conclusion to the story of Namaan.  As a successful and respected military leader and favorite of his king, Naaman knows how and through whom to get big things done.  He knows how to be successful at anything he wants.  There is one exception: he cannot find a cure for a humiliating skin disease.  Through a very unlikely channel he hears how he can be cured.  A captured slave girl, who who serves his wife, says there is a prophet in Samaria who can heal his leprosy.  Relying on the gossip of a nameless slave girl, Naaman makes arrangements that befit his status.  He plans to go right to the top and gets a letter of introduction from his king to the king of Israel.  He puts together a staggering fortune to present to anyone who can help him.  But when he arrives, the king of Israel is confused and irritated by Naaman’s inquiry.  The prophet Elisha hears of the situation and sends a messenger to the King to send Naaman to him.  With his entire  entourage, chariots, horses and vast fortune, Naaman arrives at the door of the humble prophet, who does not show even the usual courtesy of coming out to greet the important visitor.  Instead, Elisha sends a messenger with instructions:  Go wash in the Jordan seven times.  Naaman is insulted and infuriated at this treatment and at the instruction to go wash in a muddy little creek that cannot really be called a river by the standards of back home.  But those who serve Naaman plead: If you had been asked to do something difficult you would have taken the challenge with relish and not been insulted.  Follow the instructions from the prophet, they argue.  What a sight ensues– the proud military hero with powerful connections and vast wealth gets down off his high horse and washes himself in the muddy joke-of-a-river Jordan and “his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy.”

• Psalm 30

The psalmist has experienced a kind of death, which, although not identified, made him feel like he was at the end of his rope.  “I cried to you and you healed me,” he testifies in song.  “You have turned my dirge into a dance/undo my sackcloth and [instead] bind me with joy.”

• I Corinthians 9: 24-27

Using sports metaphors– competitive running and boxing– Paul compares his “training” to preach the gospel to an athlete obsessed with training to win his competition, except Paul’s trophy is “imperishable.”

• Mark 1: 40-45

Following the preceding episode (see last Sunday’s reading), where Mark’s emphasis was on Jesus’ frenetically rushing about, healing more people than could even be counted, this episode focuses on just one person with what was assumed to be an incurable disease.  A leper approaches Jesus.  In  a provocative detail, Mark says Jesus has a strong emotional reaction to the man and his situation.  The man seems to challenge Jesus: “If you choose, you can heal me.”  Just as succinctly Jesus responds: “I do choose.  Be made clean.”  Immediately he is cured.  Jesus asks him not to tell anyone.  But the man bolts out to tell anyone and everyone he meets.  As a result, Jesus can no longer move freely around the cities and towns because the crowds are too large.  So he goes out into the countryside where the crowds can come to him.

Three inter-twining questions are addressed in these readings and gospel: 1) what is the effective limit of God’s love; 2) how far is God willing to go to meet human needs; 3) what is the necessary role of those whom God touches?

Mark’s narrative immediately launches into amazing stories of Jesus rushing from house to house and town to town so he can perform exorcisms and heal as many people as feasible.  Running himself ragged, trying to occasionallly steal a few moments for himself before daybreak, Jesus responds to every person who comes to him in need, excluding no one and pursuing those who might have thought themselves as ineligible for healing.  He even reponds to strangers in the street who shout at him.   As his followers come to realize in Mark’s narrative, Jesus has the same traits of the God of the past– persisting, inveigling, pursuing individuals and alienated groups with a zealous obsession.  In this encounter from Mark’s narrative, Jesus is challenged by a man with leprosy, which was far more complicated than a medical condition.  Throughout the scriptures, leprosy is a regarded as a sign for “uncleanness,” (see many references in the Book of Leviticus, especially chapters 13 and 14).  It causes fear and repulsion. It marks a person as morally repugnant.  The only hope for a cure is from a holy person.  A leper is the ultimate test of the reach of God’s mercy and the ability and effectiveness of the holy person to whom the afflicted comes for help.  When Jesus is confronted by someone who bears the unmistakable stigma of religious, moral, social and physical revulsion, without missing a beat, Jesus heals in one crisp sentence that it seems he cannot wait to get out of his mouth.

The story of Naaman is parabolic; it captures the vanity and frailty of human nature and reveals the true nature of God’s healing.  Only after a powerful man afflicted with a dreaded skin disease was willing to follow the instructions of a holy man he actually never even met and humbled himself by following a seemingly  ridiculous  ritual was “his flesh like the flesh of a young boy.” 

In Mark’s story, we are told that Jesus asked the healed leper to not tell anyone that Jesus had healed him.  But the man was irrepressible. He immediately tells anyone and everyone he can.  The man’s response causes a change in tactic.  Rather than go from town to town, preaching and healing, Jesus must now go out into the country and let the people come to him. 

If Naaman had not followed the absurd instructions he was given, he would not have been healed; if the leper Jesus healed had kept quiet, the news about what God was doing through Jesus would not have spread.  The miracle was completed when someone repsonded.

In Acts of Religion, Jacques Derrida writes about the role of the willing witness:

“The act of faith demanded in bearing witness exceeds, through its structure, all intuition and all proof, all knowledge. (‘I swear I am telling the truth, not necessarily the “objective truth,” but the truth of what I believe to be the truth, I am telling you this truth, believe me, believe that I believe, there, where you will never be able to see nor know the irreplaceable yet universalizable, exemplary place from from which I speak to you; perhaps my testimony is false, but I am sincere and in good faith, it is not false testimony.'”  “That one is called upon to believe in testimony as in a miracle or an ‘extraordinary story’– that is what inscribes itself without hesitation in the very concept of bearing witness.  And one should not be amazed to see examples of ‘miracles’ invading all the problematics of testimony….”  (pp 98-99)

Derrida will not let us get away with some simplistic interpretation of testimony or dismissive explanation of “miracle,” (which he takes seriously).    By acknowledging  the very real delusion of human ‘objectivity’ Derrida heightens the actual role of personal testimony, which  can be ‘invaded’ by ‘miracles’.  The “healed” person completes the “miracle” with her testimony!   “Miracles” do not happen in secret; they happen out in the open and are completed through the actions and the testimony of the “healed.”   They are visible to public scrutiny and verification. 

Now we know: 1) we can accept that God’s reach knows no limits; 2) God’s healing goes anywhere and to anyone, the eligible and (perhaps especially) those regarded as ineligible by others or even themselves;  3) the response and the testimony of the one who believes she has known  God’s mercy raises the talk of “miracle.”