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 deserves a fair hearing, because it is more than a tantrum. He is "captain of the host of the king of Syria." He arrives with "ten talents of silver, and six thousand pieces of gold, and ten changes of raiment," and he carries a letter from one king to another. Yet Elisha does not even come to the door. He sends a messenger out with an instruction to wash in the Jordan, and Naaman thinks very little of that river compared with the two at home: "Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?" What stung him was the way he was treated, and any man in his place would have felt it.
Now notice who talks him round. The whole story moves forward through people who have no rank in it at all. It began with a little girl taken captive from Israel, who served Naaman's wife and told her about the prophet in Samaria. Now it is Naaman's own servants who come near. They begin with "My father," a tender way for servants to speak to a general, and then they make their 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?"
So Naaman went down and dipped himself seven times in the Jordan, "and his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child, and he was clean." His trouble had never been that the cure was too hard. He would have paid, travelled further or fought for it. What nearly sent him home was being asked to do something so small, in front of his own men, by a prophet who did not even come out to meet him. When he came back healed, he offered Elisha a gift, and Elisha refused it. God's healing could not be bought. He gives His cleansing freely to everyone who will humble themselves and take Him at His word.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 189 is How Much More (Matthew 7:11).