God's Healing Power

The theme today is God's healing power. In the Old Testament, we have Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army, healed by the Israelite prophet Elisha. In the Gospel, Jesus heals a leper. Both healing stories involve reaching across social boundaries-in the first, Naaman is healed by a prophet from an enemy people, and in the second, Jesus heals an untouchable leper. It's obvious from these stories that God's healing power is never restricted to a single community or people-it is for everyone. But also, I also want to suggest that when God heals someone, they are both physically healed and restored to community. Healing has both an individual and a social dimension.

Let's talk for a moment about leprosy in ancient Israel. It referred to a whole host of skin diseases, which actually didn't include Hanson's disease, or what we think of as leprosy today. But someone with a skin disease involving sores or an eruption of some kind was considered a leper, and as a result they were considered unclean. Touching someone with one of these diseases would make you ritually impure. You couldn't worship in the temple, and you had to go through elaborate purification rituals to become clean again-it could take a week.

This was part of what is called the Holiness Code in Leviticus. Leviticus has an elaborate set of purity regulations-certain foods were unclean, certain clothing was forbidden, touching a dead body made you unclean, touching a woman who wasn't your wife was forbidden. Last week, when Jesus healed Peter's mother in law, he violated the purity code, and he violates it again when he touches the leper.

It may be tempting to dismiss these regulations as arcane, maybe even barbaric. But looking at it in the most favorable light, it is a way to be mindful of God in everything you do. What you eat, what you wear, how you spend your time-everything is an expression of your relationship with God. These rules also recognize that we are bodies as well as spirits, and what we do with our bodies affects our spirits. When we cross ourselves, it reminds us of Christ. When we pass the peace by shaking hands, we are more apt to experience the reconciliation of that moment. And so on.

But the problem with the purity rules, and with all religious rules comes when they operate to exclude people and make them outcasts-they literally become untouchables. The prophets were critical of religious rules that oppressed people. Jesus challenges that exclusion and marginalization from the very beginning of his ministry.

Jesus came to offer healing, not only physical healing but healing of the terrible divisions among people. It's interesting that this theme of healing across boundaries and divisions between people is visible in the story from 2nd Kings as well as the Gospel. Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army, has some skin disease. His servant girl indirectly advises him to Elisha and he surprisingly takes her up on her suggestion. Think of the barriers that existed between these two people: she was female, he was male; she was a servant and he was an important person and her master; she was a captive of war and he was the commander of the army that defeated her people.

She has no reason to help him other than pure compassion-and she takes a great risk even speaking to him, let alone offering advice, let alone encouraging him to seek help from an enemy.

But God's healing love is not just for one group of people-it is for all people. God loves not only the Israelites, but their enemies the Syrians. God loves not just the ritually pure but the lepers, the women, the outcasts. God reaches across every human made division to offer healing to everyone.

When Naaman is healed, presumably he thinks differently about the people he had viewed as enemies. When the leper is healed, he can live inside the city-he is restored to community. And think about it, the healing goes both ways- the servant girl took the first step in seeing Naaman as a suffering human being. But the other Israelites in the story, the king and the prophet Elisha, no doubt saw Naaman differently when they witnessed his vulnerability and his willingness to turn to a stranger, an enemy, for healing. In the case of the leper, the community was not complete without him. Lepers had to live outside the gates of the city, away from the rest of their community. It is more apparent to the leper that he needs healing-sometimes communities don't realize that they are not whole if someone is cut off, just as families are not whole if someone is cut off.

The community that Jesus came to build is a community made up of everyone. Our calling, as Jesus' followers is to welcome absolutely everyone. The people who are similar to us and those who are different. The people we like and understand and the ones who get on our nerves, whom we don't understand. The smallest child, and the oldest senior citizen. The disabled person, the foreigner, the migrant worker. People of different creeds or with no faith at all. We are called to stretch out our hands in love across every boundary. We are called to be healed and to heal others. We are called to be part of one human community, without any outcasts, any untouchables, anyone living outside the gates of the community.