Frank Spina in one of his books gives an unpopular reminder that it's impossible to ignore the "scandal of particularity" throughout Scripture. In the Old Testament, Israel alone is God's elect people: "You only have I known of all the families of the earth" (Amos 3:2). Israel is not only God's special insider community; as Spina notes, "it is the only insider community." All other nations are distinctly outsiders — in Paul's language, "excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise" (Eph. 2:12). Similarly, the early Christians proclaimed that, "no one comes to the Father except through Jesus" (John 14:6). If you excised this "insider" theme from the biblical narrative, you would end up with a slender Bible indeed.

But that's only part of the story, and it's easy to find many plot reversals. When God elected a single community, Israel, His intentions were categorically universal in scope, that in Abraham "all peoples on earth will be blessed" (Gen. 12:3). Those same early Christians who proclaimed Jesus as the only way also imagined heaven populated with "a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language" (Rev. 7:9). When we read the Bible carefully we notice how often it features prominent outsiders. This inclusion of outsiders, Spina argues, is "neither incidental nor haphazard in the biblical witness." These outsider stories often include a significant plot reversal in which the ostensible insider is cast in a negative light and the outsider is portrayed as superior in virtue or faith. Such is the OT story that we read today.

Naaman epitomizes the quintessential outsider for several reasons. He was from pagan Aram (Syria), a military officer of a major enemy of Israel. He is no simple man and is described as "a valiant soldier, a great man in the sight of his master and highly regarded." The most amazing comment is that  "through Naaman the Lord had given victory to Aram." God gave victory to Israel's enemy through a pagan officer! However, Naaman had a skin disease (not strictly "leprosy"), which might have caused Naaman some medical problems, but his real complications were social, religious, and moral, for people with such "impurities" were stigmatized as ritually unclean and therefore excluded from community and its life and worship.

In a book “Is this your idea of a good time, God?” a conversation of Naaman’s wife Ghazal and her young Jewish maid Miriam conveys this very well.

“It doesn’t count for anything, Miriam. Not a thing.” “Ma’am?”
“Money. Status, power. It doesn’t get you anything in the end. They’ll throw us away, like so much garbage. In the end, that’s what will happen.”
“Oh, ma’am. Surely not. Your husband is the Commander of the Army. He serves the king”
“Exactly! Now there was anger in Ghazal’s voice. "He serves the king! Naaman is commander of the army. The second most powerful man in this stupid country. And this man has leprosy! He has stinking, dirty leprosy! You know what they do with people who have leprosy, Miriam. As soon as it gets a bit worse, as soon as he can't cover that spot anymore, as soon as the wounds get ugly, they'll throw him onto the garbage heap. And me with him! Wives are attached to their husbands, so I go too. They'll send us out to live in the caves with the other lepers."

As we read in the story today this young girl, an Israelite prisoner of war becomes the key character that will bring solution to this man. She is a "nobody" in social terms but she has something in her life that is worth more than money, social recognition and power. Listen more to the conversation of Miriam and Naaman’s wife:

"You are old and wise beyond your years, Miriam. You are a girl-child, a slave, a Jew, and I couldn't survive all this without you. In your quiet way, you are wise. You seem to understand, and you seem to care about me. How can you possibly care about me, Miriam, when you are my slave and I have the power of life and death over you?" The older woman looked deep into the dark, sad eyes of the girl. "Perhaps you are wise because you have suffered," said Ghazal. "You were ripped away from your home, your family. You have nothing left, except wisdom. Do we all have to suffer before we can be wise, Miriam?"

Her faith in the God that is merciful and powerful, her belief that the God of Israel who supports her in her harsh circumstances will not reject anyone who comes to Him in faith and she becomes an instrument of healing and transformation and dares to suggest to the commander that God can heal him through the Hebrew prophet Elisha.  Here is the first irony of the story: the quite powerless, insignificant Israelite girl is the one who has the saving information that the great man needs and doesn’t possess.  In his desperation, the commander goes to Samaria but he disregards the girl’s words and instead of the prophet he goes to the Israelite king. You see, people tend to gravitate only to their own counterparts, those with power to those who also possess all the trappings of power, even if none of the real power.  So, the general goes not to some religious prophet but to his own counterpart – the king. He goes there not as a “charity case”, he is not asking for a favor. He brings money and enough stuff to arrive in regal splendor into the presence of the king.  But here is another irony – the king with all his power is helpless with leprosy.  You see, in the beginning we saw the authority of insignificant young girl and here the complete inability of the king.  

Finally Naaman sets his self-confidence and pretense aside and accepts the invitation of the prophet to come to his house. This two are a great mismatch: plain and simple prophet and his visitor is a great man who arrives in a great procession with limousines and escort! More than that, Elisha specified the process of healing and it’s primitive and odd, not something the general expected. He expected a healing by fiat – that’s his way and is not ready to engage is some seedy performance of quasi-magical acts. It’s beneath him and he refuses at first.  He would rather continue as leper than humiliate and make a public spectacle of himself by washing in the Jordan seven times. There are better rivers in his Syria and he will not submit, and thus almost forfeits his odd chance for healing.

But another unnamed aid, the counterpart of the girl talks common sense to the great man who is too worried about his public image.  His servant insists: what is asked of you is neither demanding nor humiliating and it’s not costly at all to submit to. And Naaman obeyed and was healed, and then something more happens - he was also converted: "Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel." He was healed and restored to full social acceptance, given back his humanity but perhaps different than he possessed before. We can imagine that he came to realization that power for life is offered and available indeed but it’s not given in expected or even socially approved forms. It comes in primitive ways that live close to the gifts of the earth.  More than his skin must have been transformed that day. Listen to another conversation between Miriam and Naaman’s wife.

"Oh Miriam. He's back. The leprosy is gone, Miriam. He did go to the Jordan River and he's cured." The older woman took the girl in her arms. "Thank you Miriam."
There was a long silence, but finally Ghazal spoke again.
"We talked all night, Miriam. We really talked to each other. There's something that's been healed besides Naaman's leprosy, Miriam. I'm not sure what to call it, but it feels like a miracle. It was the Commander of the Army who went to Israel. But it was a man named Naaman who came back. He's a real man now, not just a swollen ego in a soldier suit.
"Naaman says that Jordan River of yours is just a muddy creek, Miriam. But maybe it soaked off his armor. Naaman says he did a lot of thinking along the way. I guess – I guess that God of yours knew that leprosy wasn't Naaman's main problem."

Naaman the outsider joined the insider community, a nameless little girl advised a great man, and the prophetic power of Elisha subverted social and political conventions. But it’s not the end of the story; it ends with a tragic reversal when greed overtook Elisha's servant Gehazi. He pursued to obtain the gifts that Naaman had offered to Elisha but which Elisha had refused. Gehazi, the insider of Israel's prophet Elisha, was then struck with the skin disease that originally afflicted the outsider pagan military general Naaman. "The story that began with this disease ends with it," writes Spina, "with the difference that its victims have been reversed: the Aramean outsider has become clean, and the Israelite insider has become unclean."
Presumption is the besetting sin and chronic temptation of the insider. To our peril we ignore, shun, and vilify the outsider as strange, dangerous and unclean. We smugly imagine that we possess the truth as few others do, rather than humbly ask God in His mercy that we might be transformed by His truth. Rather than considering solidarity with the lost, the lonely, and the outsider a privilege that enriches our lives, we construe the Biblical narrative in a narcissistic manner to serve our own petty ends.

The insider-outsider dynamic operates at many levels. Nationalism, ethnicity, an "important" job, a great salary, a prestigious school affiliation, socio-economic status, gender, age (consider how our society demeans the elderly), outward appearance image, and politics are all identities we embrace, personas that we construct, to comfort ourselves that we are insiders and to scape-goat others as outsiders. Tragic self-delusion is never far away: "God, I thank you that I am not like all other men" (Luke 18:11). It is so easy to become self-confident and reliant on their possessions, positions and belonging to God’s people and to forget the truth that Naaman’s wife discovered: “It doesn’t count for anything. Not a thing. Money. Status, power. It doesn’t get you anything in the end.”

Apostle Paul today calls us to a life, which is not presumptuous but that of self-restraints for the sake of the higher good. In our freedom and enjoyment of the grace of Christ he calls us to learn to relinquish some “freedom” which we have rights too but which might not necessarily be edifying to the whole community or to ourselves.  Our culture has the prevalent ethos of self-fulfillment, while notions of delaying gratification or denying self, characteristic of previous generations, have lost their appeal. And the insiders – the people of God – often heed more to the cultural voice and mistaken the freedom of the Gospel for license to please oneself and one’s longings.  And even when part of the ministry of the church, the one proclaiming the gospel may not be up to the test, and like a runner in a race or a boxer in the ring is subject to disqualification (1 Cor. 1:27).  What Paul is warning about is that attentiveness and discipline in a life of the insider – the believer – are essential to prevent exclusion from the very salvation one is advocating.  

He warns that the divine grace demonstrated in the gospel often leads to presumptuousness and to the grave possibility of idolatry.  While Naaman in his encounter with the healing power and mercy of God set aside his worldly belief in the power of human position, possessions and social standing, believers, whom God accepted and embraced in their nothingness, as they go through life and are lifted to better places in the world often acquire the “Naaman-before-Jordan-mentality” in which there is no place for anyone measuring up to our standard, or anyone of ‘lower status than ourselves’. It’s so easy and so dangerous for the people of God to start believing, like Elisha’s servant Gehazi: “I deserve to have some of that money” and compromise and lie a bit to get hold of it. It’s so easy but dangerous to believe the pagan Naaman’s conviction that it’s better to stay with one’s own imperfections (sins? Failures?), rather than “loose one’s faith” by openly responding call of God upon our lives.  Outsider in, insider out…

We need to remember that Israel’s privileges didn’t protect its people from the divine disfavor on their indulgences and neither are baptism, Lord’s Supper or membership in the church or in the Church Board to be thought of as magical rites that guarantee immunity from judgment. "No outcasts were cast out far enough in Jesus' world to make him shun them — not Roman collaborators, not lepers, not prostitutes, not the crazed, not the possessed. Are there people now who could possibly be outside his encompassing love?" (Garry Wills in “What Jesus Meant”). God’s grace is one and the same for both insiders and outsiders. Instead of defining other people as beyond the pale of God's love, and ourselves as already in-enough we'd do better to emulate the apostle Paul, the consummate Christian insider, who in the epistle today contemplates the real and harrowing possibility of his own banishment to outsider perdition (1 Cor. 9:24–27).

Are you an outsider in relation to God, new to hear of His grace and desire to heal and transform hearts and change lives?  Today you can submit to his simple call to come to Him in simple trust that he can do for you what no money, power or status can ever do for you. Are you the insider – part of God’s people? What is God calling you to do that might demand actions on your part that you consider embarrassing? Don’t prefer to stay as you are, submit to his calling and he will keep his promise and renew your life! Let us pray…