Learning from the Cure of Naaman, Third Monday of Lent, March 16, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Monday of the Third Week of Lent
March 16, 2020
2 Kings 5:1-15, Ps 42, Lk 4:24-30

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• The third Sunday of Lent begins a new phase in our Lenten pilgrimage. The first two-and-a-half weeks of Lent, from Ash Wednesday through Saturday of the Second Week, are all about Jesus’ call to conversion, to repent, to respond to God’s gift of mercy, and through prayer, fasting and almsgiving, to become with God’s help holy as he is holy, teleios (fit for purpose, “perfect”) as he is teleios, merciful as he is merciful. Beginning on the Third Sunday — which in Cycle A features yesterday’s Gospel of the Samaritan Woman —  we begin a specifically baptismal itinerary, helping the Elect preparing for baptism to crave ever more the Living Water, Jesus, who announces himself as such to the Samaritan Woman. It’s also a chance for those of us who have already entered the saving waters to ponder anew the crucial continuing relevance of our own baptism not as an event from many years ago but as the definitive reality of our life. During these upcoming three weeks, through the end of the Fourth Week at daily Mass (and Fifth Sunday in Cycle A), God wants to help the Elect and us to say, with the Samaritan Woman, “Give us that water always!,” the Living Water, Jesus, who begins to well up within us to eternal life on the day of our baptism. God wants each of us to say with the words of today’s Psalm, “Athirst is my soul for the living God!” Today’s readings help us to examine whether we have a faith that thirsts for God.
• Jesus returned to his hometown synagogue on the Sabbath, opened up the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah, read the section from Isaiah 61 that focuses on what the Messiah will do when at last he comes and then said “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” At first the people were amazed. But then they began to murmur, “Isn’t this the carpenter?” They began to take offense at him because he was one of them and how could one of them actually be the long awaited one? Their hearts began to harden. They weren’t responding with faith. That’s why Jesus today said to them, “No prophet is accepted in his native place.” Their admiration eventually turned to resentment and hatred. Their hardened hearts soon became homicidal as they tried to murder him by throwing him head first off a cliff. He came to his own, St. John would say, but his own didn’t accept him. They already had confined him to an unthreatening box and they weren’t going to let him escape.
• Jesus gave two examples in the Gospel of the type of open, faithful, thirsting hearts that God expects. The first is the widow of Zarephath (1 Kings 17:7-16). During a famine, God sent the Prophet Elijah to her home. Elijah asked her to prepare for him some water and some bread, but the woman replied that all she had was a little flour and a little olive oil left and she was preparing to make her last meal for her and her son before they would starve to death in the famine. Elijah told her not to be afraid because God would take care of all three of them, that the jar of flour would not be used up or the jug of oil run dry until the Lord sends rain. With trust, the woman did as Elijah said and the three of them survived for three and a half years. Jesus implies in his example that God wouldn’t have found such total trust in Israel and so Elijah had to go to a foreigner, someone who would believe in God enough not to presume he or she knew God’s designs but rather to do what the Prophet commanded. Do we have the trust in God to do what he commands us through his prophets?
• The second example Jesus employs is even stronger, and it’s based on what we read in today’s first reading. Jesus says that there were many lepers in Israel at the time of Elisha, but the only one who was cured was Naaman the Syrian, presumably because he was the only one who would come with sufficient faith to be cured by God. That faith wasn’t easy to come by, as we see in account from the Second Book of Kings. Naaman was a very successful general of the King of Aram’s army and came down with an unbelievable amount of wealth — ten silver talents (about $16,500 each in today’s money), six thousand gold pieces and ten very precious festal garments — seeking a cure for his leprosy at the instigation of one of the Jewish servants of the Naaman’s wife. He was hoping initially to buy a miracle or to get one done by the very impressive external status of the petitioner. Elisha the Prophet, however, knew that what he needed was the humble faith necessary to allow God to work. So Elisha didn’t even come to the door to greet him — and it’s not like he was on the 88th floor of an apartment complex but in a small place from which he wouldn’t even more feet to greet his supplicant — simply sending a note to bathe seven times in the Jordan River. At first Naaman was outraged, thinking he had wasted his time and so much hope coming down, to be asked to do something so simple as bathe in a river when there were rivers back in Syria. (And the waters of the Jordan are full of sediment and looks more like liquid sand than an ordinary river) But the people in his retinue reasoned with him that if he would have done something hard or spectacular, he should have the faith to do something simple and straightforward. And he had the faith and humility to change and to bathe — and on the seventh washing his leprous flesh became baby skin, totally restored.
• That whole miracle points to the type of faith we need to have with regard to the great gift of baptism and to the type of merciful healing Christ wants to give us. To human logic, the claims of baptism seem preposterous. Just like Naaman initially scoffed at what washing seven times in the Jordan river could do, so we can say with regard to the far greater claims of baptism, “How can a few drops of water on someone’s head and a short prayer [“I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”] really totally cleanse someone’s soul, make someone a temple of God’s presence, incorporate someone into Christ’s mystical body, and implant within the person a stream of Living Water flowing up to eternal life?” But that’s exactly what it does. We’re called constantly to grow in our faith-filled recognition of what happened on the day of our baptism and how it’s supposed to impact our life today. Without a doubt, Naaman would never have forgotten the day he was cured through obeying Elisha and bathing seven times. We should never forget the even greater miracle that happened to us. And we should welcome Jesus within us in baptism, not like the Nazarenes who rejected him, but like the one Nazarene girl did when Jesus took on her own flesh. Jesus the Merciful Messiah incorporates us to him in baptism.
• But it’s not only with regard to baptism in which we should have faith but so many other interactions when God has us do something that on the surface seems different than the way we would expect but that has unbelievable consequences for us if we do so with faith. We might think that praying, fasting and giving alms are all really small, somewhat inconsequential practices, but when we do them with faith they can conform us to Jesus in his praying, fasting and self-giving.  We might think that for our post-baptismal sins to be forgiven we should have to walk barefoot all the way to California, but Jesus calls us to receive his mercy by confessing our sins to his priests to whom he has given the Holy Spirit for the remission of sins. We might think that in order to get to heaven, we need to do a whole series of absolutely heroic deeds, but Jesus says that we need to love and care for him in the hungry, thirsty, naked, stranger, ill or imprisoned. We might think that for our spiritual nourishment, the most important thing would be to read an entire library of spiritual books, but Jesus says it is to make him in the Holy Eucharist the source and the summit of our life. We might think that there’s nothing to do about the coronavirus except social distancing, washing our hands like Lady Macbeth, and coughing into our sleeves, but the same Jesus who came to Nazareth, the same Lord who worked through Elijah and Elisha is here, ready to accompany  us and hear our prayers.
• One of the most important parts of the Lenten conversion God is asking of us is that we learn how to trust in him and in what he says and does rather than try, like the Nazarenes, to box him into our own limited categories. We need to approach him with faith rather than hardened hearts. To accept Jesus with honor means to recognize who he is, to thirst for him, to welcome him and what he teaches, and to obey him with faith. As we prepare to receive him now within ourselves, the place he has deigned to make a tabernacle of his holy presence, we ask him to increase our faith and gratitude in what he has already done for us and in us and to increase our trust and longing for what he still very much desires to do!

The readings for today’s Mass were: