2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c

Kings is not a book that most Christians refer to, but it is kinda central to the overall story. You get Elijah (and his contemporary Elisha), some wars, of course some Kings. Sometimes it gets a little confusing. Here we have a country, Aram that has been mentioned previously as an adversary of Israel. We a meet a king from there, but he has leprosy. The gospel passage will have lepers in the more well known position of the “unclean”. This could be a translation problem in Kings, some say it is not leprosy, but we know he is sick. This king finds out about someone who can help him from his slave, an Israelite girl. So he sends a letter to that king in Israel.

Then we have the King of Israel tearing his clothes. Don't worry, that's just how they expressed grief. A letter from a foreign king asking you to do something you don't think you can do would cause some anguish. If you fail or refuse, you might have a fight on your hands. Luckily Elisha steps up. But the Aramean king is not sure he's happy with Elisha, kings expect a certain amount of ceremony and protocol. When he talks of rivers, he's comparing the rivers in his kingdoms to the ones in theirs.

It's a nice story, where the servants give him good advice, and it was the slave who had the idea in the first place, and it all works out. It's a reversal, where enemies become friends. Something you don't hear too much about, especially in the Old Testament.

2 Timothy 2:8-15

Some passages are harder than others. I suppose that's obvious. My first inclination is to attempt to salvage something from the text. If I don't have a good reason to abandon a passage, cordon it off into some historical context, or dismiss as something that was a forgery with a nefarious agenda, I look for redeeming qualities. The phrase “ avoid wrangling over words” jumped out of this text at me.

I went looking for other opinions on that, and mostly found interpretation of it being about not fighting over the use of specific words but instead looking for meaning, or worse about not trying to understand deeper meaning. Then I found a couple pieces of good advice.

1) “Words do not have meanings; they have usages”. If you're as old as me, words like “gay” and “bad” are words you have to be careful with. “Bad” can mean “good”, at least it did for a while in the 80's, then in the 90's things were “phat”, now I'm not sure what word to use. 130 years ago, they had the “gay 90's” or you had a “gay ole time”, now that word means something very different, and that usage is probably nearing the end of its time.

I put this in quotes because that's how Dr. Ray Frank Robbins, a late theologian and professor of Greek put it. He knew to beware when a pastor said, “what the Greek means here”. Words have usages, so a definition of a Greek word found on a website, or even in a text book, might not be the usage intended in the text.

2) Always back off and look at the biggger picture. That comes from the article by Joe McKeever where I found the 1st one. I often suggest reading the full chapter of a lectionary item, but there's more to it. A verse may be isolated and seem out of place, and it's tempting to believe you've found something no one else has noticed. Atheists are particularly bad at this. They can be as guilty as fundamentalists at taking a verse literally. I don't even like the word “literal” since it implies a correct reading. I like Majid Nawaaz's use of the word “vacuous”.

A vacuous reading leads to conclusions like Jesus is not who everyone says he was. Hold on a minute, who is this “everyone”? You haven't established a consistent consensus and now you're saying there is something wrong with the consensus. Better to find a scholar or a historian, someone who has gone down the same road you're on with this verse. There are rich cultures and decades of time that might have embraced what you've found. See where they ended up.

Luke 17:11-19

I'm not too impressed by the healing of lepers, although apparently being able to heal them was a sign of the messiah. Given that it was, it seems more likely someone would make up a story that Jesus did this healing. I prefer to look at it as a metaphor. There are non-contagious forms of leprosy, but the average person wouldn't know it from the contagious variety just by looking. So the idea of them being “unclean” and thus untouchable was a legitimate health concern. Still, in a parable, I think it is a metaphor for the underclass, the people who are beyond help, who probably did something wrong to deserve their fate, who aren't practicing their religion correctly, and should just be left to beg and die.

In this one, there are two parts to this healing. One is Jesus is saying they are healed. Leprosy could heal, but not instantly as in this story. Actually, the story might compress a longer period, it's not clear. But this is Jesus saying they are welcomed back into the community despite their leprosy. The second part is that they accept this healing, they don't question Jesus. Their faith in this new leader is part of their getting back in. They are told to go to the priests because they are the officials who will actually say if they are cured or not.

Then we have the one who returns and gives thanks. I'm all for that, but there's more going on here. This is probably a statement about “giving the glory to God”, a phrase you might hear in churches or around church events that happen in the community. When something great is being done by people with strong faith and there is much excitement, they get a little nervous about patting each other on the back, because they don't want God to think they don't know where the idea came from. If something good just happened, it must be from God. They are sure to thank Him.

To pack a little more into this short parable, the thankful one is a Samaritan. Samaritans were foreigners to the Jewish communities, but they were neighbors and they mixed. In this case, they mixed with Jews in the group of lepers based on their common low status. Samaria was once part of the kingdom but after the Babylonian exile had developed a more eclectic culture with elements of other religions. The details of these politics are probably not the point. The story is saying something either about religious tolerance or on focusing on the quality of a person, instead of their origins.