Sunday/Naaman

Sunday/Naaman

Today's gospel is the "Prophet in his own land" gospel. This is a great one-liner: foreignness and mystery help influence people and familiarity undermines authority. It would seem this is a bit self-deprecating, as if there was a geographic component of God and his message. But Christ is talking about the audience and how familiarity has softened the religious sensitivity of Isreal. He then makes it worse by bringing up the story of Naaman.

The story of Elisha, Naaman, and Gehazi in the Old Testament is one of those hand-grenade stories that gets more disturbing the closer you get to it. In essence, Elisha, the Israel prophet, cures Naaman, the enemy general, of leprosy, and Elisha's servant, Gehazi, takes financial advantage of it. Shakespearian, in a way. But Christ says, 'why Naaman and not all the widows and orphans of Israel with leprosy?' He's saying that God's message is not tribal. So the crowd chased him out of town and tried to kill him.

Tribalism is old and new with rare interregnum. And people want to keep it, not escape it. But it is hard to keep a universal vision your own.