Naaman and the Seven Dips in the Jordan

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A general is standing in a river, up to his waist, and he is furious.

He has come a very long way. He has brought horses, and chariots, and servants, and a great deal of silver and gold. He has been told, by a king, that everything will be all right. And now a man he has never met has told him, by way of a messenger, to take a bath in a muddy stream.

He is not doing it. Not yet. He is only standing at the edge, and he is thinking about leaving.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is from the second book of Kings, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture, and we will tell it straight, as it is written. The weather, the road, the thoughts of the horses and a few small words between a general and his household are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will tell you at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let us start with the man himself, because the book starts with him, and it is very generous to him.

His name was Naaman. He lived in a country called Aram, which sat to the north-east of Israel, around the city of Damascus, and which was, in his day, a good deal bigger and richer than its neighbour. The two countries did not get on. They had a border, and the border had a long habit of being crossed by soldiers, and the soldiers did not stay polite.

Naaman was the commander of the king of Aram's army. That is how the book introduces him. And then it adds, in a single line, that he was a great man, and highly regarded by his master, because by him the Lord had given victory to Aram.

I want you to notice that line. It is a surprising thing for the Bible to say. Naaman is not an Israelite. He does not worship the God of Israel. He is, in all the ordinary senses, on the other side. And the book says, without any embarrassment, that the Lord had given victory through him. The story is going to be about a lot of things, but one of them is that God's attention is wider than a border.

Then comes the second half of the line. The book says: "but the man was a leper."

Now a word about that, because it is a word that has changed. In the Bible, the old word we translate as leprosy covers a whole family of skin diseases, and some of them were not what a doctor today would call leprosy at all. We do not know which one Naaman had, and the chapter does not tell us. What it tells us is that it was bad enough to end a career in some places, and that in Israel it would have kept him out of the camp altogether. In Aram, it seems, it did not. His king still trusted him. His soldiers still followed him. But he would have felt it every morning, in the mirror, on his hands, on the back of his neck, and every doctor in Damascus had looked at it and shaken their heads.

So picture him. He is rich, he is respected, he is successful, and he has one thing in his life that none of it can fix. I think most of us know someone like that. I think most of us have been that, in a small way, on some afternoon.

And now we come to the person the whole story turns on, and I would like you to meet her properly, because the book hardly lets us.

In Naaman's house, there was a girl.

She was a young girl, the book says, from the land of Israel. The soldiers of Aram, on one of their raids across the border, had taken her captive, and she had been given as a servant to Naaman's wife. That is all we are told. We do not learn her name. We do not learn her village, or her parents, or how old she was, or whether she had brothers who were looking for her. We are told only that she was a child, and that she was taken, and that she ended up in a house where nobody spoke her language at home.

I will say that the old sources do not tell us what she was called, which I think is an oversight, and I have decided, for tonight, that we will simply call her the girl, and trust that God knows her name, because the story certainly seems to.

Now think about what she might have felt. She has been taken from her home by the army of a man, and she is now carrying his wife's shoes and sweeping his floors. If she had been bitter, no one would have blamed her. If she had said nothing, and let the great man's skin get worse, no one in Damascus would ever have known she could have helped.

And one day, in the quiet of the house, while she is working near her mistress, the girl says something.

She says: "If only my master were with the prophet who is in Samaria. He would cure him of his leprosy."

That is the whole speech. It is one sentence. It has no anger in it, and it has no demand. It is not even a suggestion, exactly. It is a wish, said aloud, by a child who has been wronged, on behalf of the man who did the wronging, and I have thought about it for a long time and I still find it hard to read without a catch in my throat.

She did not have to say it. She did say it. And everything else in the chapter happens because she did.

Naaman's wife tells him. Naaman, who has tried everything, goes to the king of Aram and tells him what the girl said. And the king, who is very fond of his general, says the thing a king would say.

"By all means, go," he says. "I will send a letter to the king of Israel."

Now, you and I may think that the sensible next step would be to find out where the prophet lives. But the king of Aram is a king, and a king thinks in terms of kings, and it has not occurred to him that a prophet might be somewhere other than the palace. So Naaman packs for a diplomatic visit. The book tells us exactly what he takes. Ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten changes of clothing. That is a very large sum. It is a king's ransom, in the plainest sense, and it is a lot of luggage. I picture the horses looking at each other.

And so the great general sets out on the road to Israel, with his chariots and his servants and his gold, and the girl's one sentence tucked away in his mind. It is a long way. It is a hard road. And I would like to ask you to think, for a moment, about how much a man has to want something to carry that much silver across a border that has been closed for years, on the word of a servant girl.

He arrives. He hands the king of Israel the letter. And the letter says, in effect: "With this letter I am sending you my servant Naaman, so that you may cure him of his leprosy."

I would like you to imagine the king of Israel reading that.

He is a king. He is not a prophet and not a doctor. He has been handed, in front of his whole court, an enemy general and ten talents of silver and a request to do something which he knows perfectly well he cannot do. And he does not think, as the girl had thought, of the prophet. He thinks of the border. He thinks of the army. He thinks the king of Aram has sent him an impossible task so that, when he fails, there will be a reason to go to war.

And the book says: when the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes.

That is what a person did, in those days, when the news was very bad. He grabbed the front of his robe in both hands and ripped it. And he says, to nobody in particular, "Am I God, to give death and life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just see how he is picking a quarrel with me."

It is, I think, a very understandable reaction. It is also a very funny one, in its way, because the whole court is now standing in a room with a visiting general, and the king has just ruined a perfectly good robe.

And the news goes out. News did, in those days, with the speed of a rumour in a village. And it comes to a man in the countryside, a prophet named Elisha, who is, the book calls him, a man of God.

I should say something about Elisha, because this is the first time tonight he has appeared, and he is a good deal more than a footnote. He was the follower, and then the successor, of Elijah, whom some of you will know from the night we told about the still small voice. Elisha had taken up Elijah's cloak when the older prophet was taken to heaven, and in the years since, he had gone about the country, healing and warning and feeding, and telling kings things they did not always want to hear. He is a gentle man in most of the stories, and a firm one, and he does not seem to be afraid of palaces.

So he sends a message to the king of Israel. It is very short.

"Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come to me, that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel."

I want you to hear what is in that, because it is easy to miss. He does not say, let him come to me and I will heal him. He says, let him come to me that he may know there is a prophet in Israel. The point of it is not Elisha. It is not even, at first, the leprosy. The point is that a stranger and an enemy and a very important man will find out something true about the God of Israel, whom he has not met.

So Naaman goes. He goes with his horses, and his chariots, and his silver and his gold and his ten changes of clothing, and he pulls up outside the door of the prophet's house.

And I would love to be able to tell you that the door opens, and that Elisha comes out in a splendid robe, and that there is a ceremony. The book doesn't give us that. It says, instead, that Elisha sent a messenger to him.

A messenger. Not the prophet himself. A servant, who walks out of the house, down the path, past the horses, to the foot of the chariot, and says, as plainly as someone reading out a recipe: "Go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh will be restored, and you will be clean."

And that is the end of the message. The messenger goes back in.

Pause with me for a moment and put yourself in Naaman's place. He is the commander of the army of a great nation. He has travelled for days. He has crossed a border. He has endured a king tearing his robes. He has brought, if you add it up, enough silver and gold to buy a small town. And he has been told, through a servant, by a man he can't see, to go and have a wash.

The book says: Naaman was angry.

It is a very human anger, and the book lets him speak it out loud. "I thought," he says, "that he would surely come out to me, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy."

You can hear it, can't you? I thought. I thought it would be like this. I had a picture. In the picture there was a ceremony, and a hand being waved, and some kind of respect shown to me for having come all this way. And what he got was a cold shoulder and a river.

And then, because he is angry, he says the second thing, which is even better. "Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be clean?"

Those are the rivers at home. They are clear and quick, I am told, and they run down from the mountains through the gardens of Damascus, and they are, to a man from there, simply better. The Jordan is a muddy, slow, ordinary river. And Naaman, with a skin disease no one has cured, standing at the door of the only man who might help him, has decided that the thing standing between him and healing is that the water isn't nice enough.

I do not say this to laugh at him. I say it because I have done it. We all have. We say, if only it were something harder, something grander, something that cost more. We would do almost anything, we think, if it were big. And the thing in front of us is small, and we turn away.

So the book says that he turned, and went off in a rage.

And now the story needs someone else, and the someone else is the servants.

They have said nothing so far. They have driven the horses, and carried the gold, and held their breath. But as the chariot swings round to go home, one of them, the book does not say which, steps forward. He does not say, my lord, you are wrong. He says, "My father."

That is what he calls him. It is a very tender way to address a master. It is the way you speak to a man you love and are about to disagree with.

"My father," he says, "if the prophet had commanded you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more, when he says to you, Wash, and be clean?"

I have always thought this was the wisest sentence in the chapter. It is not clever. It does not make an argument. It simply puts the question the way a friend would put it, which is: if it had been hard, you would have done it, so why not do it when it's easy?

And Naaman, who was an angry man a minute ago and who is a great general, listens. This is the second remarkable thing about him. The first is that he travelled so far on a child's word. The second is that he lets his servants talk him round.

He turns the chariot. He goes down to the river.

Let me tell you what the book says, and let me say it slowly, because it is short and I do not want to hurry past it.

"So he went down, and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God."

Seven times. The book does not tell us anything about the first six. Maybe he came up each time and looked at his arm, and nothing had changed. Maybe he felt foolish. Maybe the servants stood on the bank with the towels, and did not say a word, and the horses looked the other way. I like to think of the river being the colour that rivers are, and the morning being quite ordinary, and a very important man going under the water, and coming up, and going under, and coming up, and counting.

And then the seventh.

"And his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean."

That is the whole description. It does not say there was light, or a sound. It says his flesh was like the flesh of a little child. I love that. It does not say he was made new, like a stranger. It says he was made young, the way a child's skin is, and I think for a man who had spent years as a soldier, and years on top of that as a leper, that must have been the very thing he missed without knowing it.

Now what does Naaman do?

He does not go home. This is the part I most want you to hear, because it would have been so easy for him to have done. He has what he came for. The prophet has not asked for a thing. He could get back into the chariot, and tell the servants to hurry, and be in Damascus before the week was out.

Instead, he turns round. He goes back, the book says, with all his company, to the man of God, and he stands in front of him, and he says: "Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel."

That is a very large sentence for a very large man to say. He has not been taught it. He has not read it. He has been washed in a river, in a country that is not his, and what he has learned is the first thing there is to learn. He says: Now I know.

And then he does what rich people do. He tries to pay. He says, "Please accept a present from your servant."

And Elisha says: "As the Lord lives, whom I serve, I will accept nothing."

Naaman presses him. The book says he urged him. And Elisha refuses. He will not take the silver, or the gold, or the ten changes of clothing. I think we should pause on that too. It was a great deal of money, and the prophet was not a rich man. But the healing was not his to sell. It had been given, and what has been given has to stay given, or it stops being a gift.

And now two small requests. They are among my favourites in the whole book, because they are the kind of thing a real person would say.

The first is a very practical one. "If not," says Naaman, "please let there be given to your servant two mule-loads of earth."

Two mule-loads of earth. Why? Because Naaman has decided that, from now on, he will not offer sacrifice to any god except the Lord. And in the world he lives in, a god belongs to a country, and you worship him on his own ground. If he is going to worship the God of Israel at home in Damascus, he wants a bit of Israel to stand on. So he asks for the soil, in the way that you might ask for a stone from a place you loved.

I do not think the book is saying that this is how it works. I think it is showing us a man who has just learned something enormous, and who is trying, with the tools he has, to take it home with him.

The second request is harder, and he is honest about it. He says: "In this matter may the Lord pardon your servant. When my master goes into the house of Rimmon to worship there, leaning on my arm, and I bow down in the house of Rimmon, when I do bow down, may the Lord pardon your servant in this matter."

Rimmon was a god of Aram. The king of Aram worshipped him, and the king leaned on Naaman's arm when he went into the temple, and Naaman was afraid that when he went with him, he would be seen to bow. He does not hide it. He does not say, I will find a way round it. He tells the prophet, to his face, here is the difficulty I am going to have, and I am sorry for it in advance.

And I want you to hear what Elisha says. He does not argue. He does not give a lecture. He does not say yes, and he does not say no. He says three words.

"Go in peace."

That is all. Go in peace. And the commander of the army of Aram, healed in body, and changed in a great many other ways, gets back into his chariot, with the servants and the horses and the silver and the gold that nobody wanted, and two mule-loads of earth, and goes home.

The book goes on from there. There is another part to the chapter, about a servant of Elisha who was not as content as his master, and it is a sad piece, and it is not a bedtime piece, and so we will leave it for another night. What matters tonight is where we have been, and we have been to a river.

Let me say something about why this story has been loved.

The Lord himself tells it. In the Gospel of Luke, when he is speaking in the synagogue at Nazareth, he reminds the people that there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet, and that none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian. He says it to a crowd that did not much like hearing it. He says it, I think, because it is true, and because it is one of the clearest pictures in all of Scripture of what he came to do: to reach people on the far side of every border we draw.

The early Church read it in another way too. Teachers like Ambrose of Milan saw in the seven washings of Naaman a picture of baptism, of ordinary water, and an ordinary word, and an unlikely cure. They pointed out that the water in the Jordan did nothing on its own, and that it was the obedience, and the word of God over it, that made it work. And they noticed that it is the humble thing that is asked. Not a great thing. A small one, that costs your pride more than your purse.

And do you see how it all hangs on small people? On a girl who was taken from her home and said one sentence. On a servant who said "my father" and asked a gentle question. On a messenger, who walked out of a house and said six words and went back in. The great men in the story do their parts, and the king tears his robe, and the general rages, and the prophet is steady. But the story is moved, at every turning, by someone who is not important at all.

I think that is the kind of thing we are meant to remember when we are small ourselves. A sentence can be enough. A kindness said out loud, in a house where nobody expects it, to the person who hurt you, may be the beginning of a river.

Now. Notes for the curious.

Everything in tonight's story about Naaman, the girl, the king of Aram, the king of Israel, Elisha and the washing comes from the second book of Kings, chapter five. The silver, the gold and the changes of clothing, the tearing of the robe, the rivers of Damascus, the servants' words, the seven times in the Jordan, the confession, the refused gift, the earth and the house of Rimmon, and the words "Go in peace" are all in the chapter. The words of the king, the girl, the prophet and Naaman are told in plain paraphrase and not word for word.

What we invented is the weather, the road, the thoughts of the horses, and the picture of the servants standing on the bank with towels. The book does not tell us what the first six dips were like, and we have only imagined them, and said so.

A few details are worth being careful about. First, the chapter calls Naaman's illness by a word that older Bibles translate as leprosy. Scholars think it names several skin diseases, and we do not know which one he had. Second, in the Greek numbering used by the Orthodox Church, this book is called the fourth book of Kingdoms, so if you look for it in an Orthodox Bible, that is where it is. Third, the chapter does not say how old the girl was, or what her name was, or whether she ever went home, and we have not guessed. Fourth, the book does not tell us what Elisha thought about the request concerning the house of Rimmon beyond the three words, and we have not tried to say. Teachers in the Church have read those three words in different ways, and we leave it there.

And a last note about the end of the chapter, which we left out. It continues with the story of Elisha's servant Gehazi, who runs after Naaman to ask for the gifts the prophet refused, and who is punished for it. It is a hard story. It is in the Bible, and we have not pretended otherwise. We have simply left it for another night.

That's the story of Naaman and the seven dips in the Jordan for tonight. If you would like to remember the prophet Elisha in your prayers, the Orthodox Church keeps his memory on the fourteenth of June, and the Carmelite family in the Catholic Church honours him as well. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing. May there be, on the long road you are on, someone who says a small true thing at the right moment. May you have the grace to listen when it is said. May the thing you are asked to do be smaller than you hoped, and may you do it anyway. May you come up, at the end, with the skin of a little child, and a heart that turns round to say thank you. And may the water that you go down into, whatever it is, be the water that heals.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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