Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 189 · July 8
Some Great Thing
“And his servants came near, and spake unto him, and said, My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean?”
"Behold, I thought, He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the LORD his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper."
Naaman's complaint is worth stating properly, because it is not petulance. He is captain of the host of the king of Syria, arriving with ten talents of silver, and six thousand pieces of gold, and ten changes of raiment, and a letter from one king to another. Elisha does not come to the door. He sends a messenger out with an instruction about a river Naaman ranks below the two at home: Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? The insult is in the handling, and any man in his position would have felt it.
Who talks him down is the thing to notice. The whole story runs on people with no standing in it at all. It began with a captive girl taken out of Israel, waiting on Naaman's wife, who mentioned a prophet in Samaria. Now his own servants come near and open with My father, which is not how staff address a general, and then put the case: if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean?
He went down and dipped seven times, and his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child. The objection was never to the difficulty. He would have paid, travelled further, fought something. What he nearly went home over was being asked for nothing, in front of his own men, by a man who did not get up.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 189 is How Much More (Matthew 7:11).