Pride Overcoming Want

2 Kings v. 11

Bat Naaman was wroth, and went away, and said, 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.

‘1 1TE are justified, by the whole tenor of the Mosaic law as to leprosy, in regarding that frightful disease as a parable and symbol.

The ancient ritual treated it in a fashion which is not to be accounted for by sanitary considerations. The leper had to wear the signs of mourning for the dead. He was rigidly separated from society, though the balance of evidence goes to show that the disease was rarely, if at all, contagious. The ceremonial connected with his healing was elaborate and protracted, and restored him first to the communion of his brethren, and afterwards to participation in the blessings of the covenant with God. This whole legislation is intelligible only if we suppose that this one disease was selected in order to set forth the true connection between sin and

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death, and to represent by the terrible analogies of bodily corruption and piecemeal dissolution the sickness of the soul and the ravages that are made in it Leprosy was hereditary. It was incurable, at least to the medical skill of that age. Its progress was slow but certain. It ate away bone and flesh; limbs dropped, and the flesh was “half consumed.” The sufferer was “a walking sepulchre,” a ghastly “death in life,” No wonder that leprosy should be called “the stroke,” and that the leper should be taken by God, in His merciful law, as a living emblem of the death which is the wages of sin.

And we have our Lord’s authority for seeing in this story of Naaman at least some of the principles which regulate the dispensation of His love and grace, exemplified for the world. He alleges it as an instance of the way in which the universal love over-leaped all national distinctions, and surged over the barriers which Jewish narrowness would have erected for its free course. “None of them were cleansed, save Naaman, the Syrian.” These two facts, at least, warrant us in dealing by way of allusion and illustration with this whole story, as being a “little window through which we may see a great matter” — as being a picture for us of far wider things than itself.

I need not spend time over the remarkably graphic details of the story. Look, for instance, at that eloquent but in the very first verse. After all the pompous enumeration of the whole of Naaman’s titles — “captain of the host of the king of Syria, a great man with his master, and honourable, because by him the Lord hath given deliverance unto Syria” — (which, by the way, an old Jewish tradition explains by saying that he was the man who “pulled a bow at a venture” that killed Ahab — comes the suggestive antithesis, made all the strongc by the absence in the original of the connecting “but” QJ our version — but he was a leper! There is a but in ever) man’s fortunes, because there is a but in every man’s character. The loving solicitude of the little slave-girl, the imperious insolence of the Syrian king’s letter, the impotent despair of the king of Israel, the lofty confidence of the prophet, the ostentatious pageantry of the long train of horses and chariots with which the proud sick n travelled, and their halt there at the prophet’s

amble door, stand before us in the story as sharp and clear as objects do beneath that Eastern sky. The great man and all his corte’ge are kept outside, and God’s servant will not even come out, but sends the message, •” Go and wash in Jordan.” That uncourtly reception is DO piece of vulgar arrogance, like the pride of a pope that keeps an emperor standing in the snow in the castle yard for three days, before he will absolve him. It is the wise dealing of that Divine Word which, whether it come seeking those who seek it not, or remains still in the same place where it was, even when called upon with tears, or shows itself froward to the froward, hath ever one purpose of mercy in view, and pursues it equally when it “saves the afflicted,” and when it “brings down the high looks.”

With soldier-like quickness of temper and pride, he

3 R flashes all at once into a blaze. Leper as he is, and, having come there to beg a cure, he cannot stand this with patience; and in his wrath, he lets us see curiously and naturally enough all his expectations, and what he thinks his reasonable ground of anger. He has not been treated with proper respect — “I thought he will surely come out to me” — to me, the great man with all these chariots and horsemen at my back, and talents of silver and pieces of gold, and changes of raiment in my bags, enough to make this pauper of a prophet a rich man for the rest of his life. He might at least have been civil enough to come out to me. I expected, too, that he would stand and call on the name of the Lord, his God, and make a great to-do, and perform some magical ceremonies, and so recover the leper; and instead of that, I get a message to go and wash in that little stream, the Jordan, when Abana and Pharpar, the sweet rivers of Damascus, are far better than all these. And so, pride, and sense, and national feeling were all blended together, and he turned and went away in a rage! Then his wiser servants calm him by reason, and remind him that he would have been willing to obey the prophet if he had prescribed him some hard thing, and that it was surely, therefore, common sense at any rate to see what would come of doing the very simple thing which he did command.

The characteristics which offended Naaman are the characteristics of God’s cure for the leprosy of our spirits. They are its glory even though men may stumble at them. Look at them as brought out here.

I. Note then, what in this man’s eyes was a fault — what, to clearer vision, is a glory — the utter indifference of the Gospel to all distinctions among nun.

Naaman wanted to be treated as a great man that happened to be a leper; Elisha treated him as a leper that happened to be a great man. He did so, not out of rudeness or caprice, but to bring this thought home to him: — Your adventitious distinctions (as you might know and feel) are of very small consequence as long as your skin shines with the ghastly whiteness of death; and as long as it does, you must be willing, first, to be treated as a leper; and, secondly •, as the commander-in-chief of the armies of Damascus.

And if we put this into more general words, we are brought into full view of that great characteristic of the Gospel which is at once its glory and its offence — that it deals with all men as on one level. The community in the sickness of sin destroys all distinctions. There is a prince lying on that bed; there a stable-boy on that. They are ill of the same disease, which affects the man, not his office. They need the same treatment, and — thank God! — they get it from Him who is no respecter of persons. There is abundant distinction of ranks made by all organized Christianity; for we all carry a greater or less measure of worldliness in us; and churches, and priests, and preachers, and congregations of all sorts, are only too ready to respect the gay clothing and the gold ring. But in so far as we do, we are untrue to our Master and to His message. The Gospel shows its Divine origin by this, that it brushes aside all these as utterly insignificant — surface distinctions that mean nothing and are irrelevant, and goes right to the centre of the thing — to the heart of humanity, where we all of us are alike.

Such treatment is true to the fact of man’s condition. For it is a fact that we are all alike in sin, In us all there nas been and is a voluntary divergence and deflection from the line of right, which darkens a man’s soul. “All the world is guilty before God!” You cannot refute, and you will not mend that old saying about man’s condition. No other theory is so profoundly and accurately true, as that on which the Bible proceeds — the universal fact oi sin, the universal guilt of sin, the universal burden of sin. That truth does not conflict with the other, which is sometimes urged as if it were antagonistic, but which the Bible distinctly recognizes, of the greatness and beauty of the fragments of something nobler and better that still remain; or with the other, to which it leads up, of the possibility of a recovery. It leaves undisputed the glowing words in which poets and thinkers have celebrated the dignity of humanity; only it asserts along with their assertion of what is true about man’s nature, that man’s nature now is unnatural, de formed, smitten with a leprosy, corroding by slow decay. ft is the deepest message about our condition, responded to in that inmost chamber of the soul, where, in all of us, there slumbers a solemn voice that speaks sometimes as rrom afar, in low, curt, authoritative rebuke, and when- .oever it speaks is the voice of God in the heart

And then there is the other consideration, that, if this be so, then that moral and spiritual condition is, in certain aspects, the most important thing about a man.

Let me put it into plain English. Whether do you think it matters most in your relation to God — yours and mine — that we are sinners, or that we are cultivated people? Whether do you think it matters most that our hearts have started aside from Him and our hands have done evil, or that we can read Latin and Greek books and are scholars? Whether do you think it matters most that we have broken God’s commandments, or that here, in Manchester, we have made a quantity of money, and live in fine houses, and take a position before our fellows? Are we going to stand upon our miserable, tiny mole-hills beneath those solemn stars far above us and say — “Their light ought to fall upon us in another fashion from what it does on those people that live a little lower down “? I am a rich man. Come out and strike thy hand over the place. I have got a cultivated taste, a highly polished intellect I must have another gospel from the vulgar crowd. 1 am a man of position and fame. I am not going to be treated like that poor old woman in her garret, like that soul struggling with insanity, like that little child, like that barbarian just dragged out of cannibalism and savagery. There must be something special for me 1

There u something for you. If the distinctions on which you pride yourselves are worth anything, they will help you to apprehend and profit by God’s gift But the gift is one. You must be content to sit at the public table, to make one of the thousands on the grass there, ted with the same food as all the others, — women children, cripples and beggars among them, — are fed on. If any Pharisee or scribe will gather up his robes about him, and demand a meal apart, he will have to go without. It is the same air which vivifies all men’s blood, the same light which gleams in all men’s eyes, the same Gospel which saves all men’s souls.

For this treatment of all men as alike sinners is the precursor of as universal a mercy. All are alike in two facts — that we have sinned, and that Christ has died for us. “He hath shut up all in unbelief that He might have mercy upon all.” As sin and death, so God’s love and Christ’s work know nothing of our superficial distinctions. Ere we meet in in Discriminate lifelessness in the grave, which levels all in one corruption, we may meet in equal blessedness in the mercy of God in Christ, which raises us all to one height of pardon and peace. His love pours over all the walls of separation among men, and comes to you and me, dear brethren, as it comes to every soul upon earth, dealing with that in us which is common to us with all our fellows, and neglecting altogether that in us by which we are distinguished from our fellows. “There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither bond nor free. There is neither male nor female” in the adaptation, in the destination, and in the invitation with which that Gospel comes to us.

And, therefore, some men turn away from it There is the narrow gate! Plenty of room for you — no room for the load of adventitious distinctions that you carry upon your shoulders. And so “he turned, and went away in a rage !w And many a heart, all unconscious perhaps of the course of thought which is leading to it, does the same thing. Men crave for a particular and special gospel, kick at the idea of being paralleled and levelled with every poor sinner and every fool upon the face of the earth; will not have the message that recognizes nothing except the common humanity, the common sin, and the universal pardon!

And let me remind you how this superb indifference of the Gospel to all these distinctions of man from man, is its true glory, and has wrought wonderful things. The Gospel came into a world all swathed in ligatures, all cleft into classes, parted from one another by deep gulfs which there was no bridging, where nations frowned at one another from their battlements, and caste, and class, and race, and culture rent men apart from their fellows, and nothing but the grip of an iron hand and the false unity of conquest held them together. The Gospel, the true democracy, came and struck the bonds from the slave, taught the sentiment of fraternity, gave a new word and a new thought to the languages of earth — “humanity” — made men and women equal possessors of an equal grace! Not by violent revolution, not by seeking to touch institutions, but by setting the example of bringing spiritual truths with brave confidence and utter contempt for all distinctions equally to every class of men! And the miner in his cave, and the prince upon his throne, and the grey barbarian, and the Christian child cluster together round the one throne. We being many are one bread, “for we are all partakers of that one bread.” And class distinctions, and national rivalries, and professional enmities, and all the narrowness which separate men from men pass away in proportion as the broad universalities of a Gospel that proclaims all under sin, and brings the equal remedy for the highest and the lowest, for the wisest and most foolish are discerned and accepted.

“He turned and went away in a rage ln And the world turns, and will yet do so in all its peoples and classes — no longer parted but blended in one faith, and one Lord, to Him who is the equal Saviour to the whole race of men.

II. We may draw from these words an illustration of what I venture to call the naked simplicity of God’s Gospel.

He said, “Behold, I thought, he will come, and stand, and call on the name of the Lord his God, and strike his hand over the place, and so by all that ceremonial he will recover the leper.” And what does he get instead of all this? Go and wash, and be clean.

It was very like a heathen, accustomed to muttered spells and magical incantations, whose whole religion clung close to the low levels of earth, whose gods and whose worship, whose hopes and whose fears, were alike material, to crave for some external ritual of cleansing. It was very like a man to long for something visible and tangible for his wavering confidence to lay hold upon — some fixed point belonging to solid earth to which he might fasten the filmy frailty of his faith. It was very like GodiQ contradict the desire and to give him instead — only a promise to grasp, and a command to obey, which was chiefly a test of his obedience, since common sense told him that water could not wash away the eating evil and national pride rebelled against the pre-eminence of the river of Israel

The like apparent antagonism between men’s wishes and God’s ways meets us in the Gospel — and the like correspondence between God’s ways and men’s real wants. Christianity comes to us — or rather, instead of that abstract word, let us say Christ, who is Christianity, comes to us — trusting wholly and only to spiritual remedies. He, too, says “wash and be clean.” The one power that cleanses is His blood for pardon, His spirit for holiness. The one condition of receiving these is simple faith in Him; all externals are nothing. Forms and ceremonies, acts of worship, and church ordinances are of no avail The bond that unites us to Him who is our life, is the medium through which life flows to us. And that one bond is faith; and that life is the life-giver who died for us. The Gospel depends wholly on spiritual forces, and is received only by spiritual acts.

And so people feel out of their element in a region thus purely spiritual and immaterial The heathenism which is in all of us, the sense-bound materialism which sways us all, lays hold of the pure Gospel which Christ wrought and gives, and deforms it by tacking on to it an incongruous and heterogeneous appendage of rites and ceremonies, and by investing the simple ordinances which he enjoined with mysterious power. What is all that cloud of teaching about sacramental efficacy, which darkens the very Sun of righteousness, but a mist born from the marshes of sense that lie undrained in so-called Christendom? It is nothing else than the modern form of ancient heathenism. It is the expression of the old desire to have God and His gifts brought within the limits of the senses. “Bring down this incorporeal attenuated nothing into the low region where I dwell” Let me have “good, strong, stupefying altar smoke” — to quote words familiar to some of you, in which that spirit is wonderfully expressed — and let me “see God made and eaten all day long” upon the altar there.

And so we are told that even such a story as this of our text points to the supernatural efficacy of baptism, and that “wash and be clean” is the symbol of that holy layer of regeneration. I need only say about that, that an external act cannot be the symbol of an external act That is false heraldry, colour upon colour. If it is a symbol at all, the material must be a symbol of the spiritual; the outward act, of the inward submission to the cleansing of the soul; the washing which purified the leper, of the faith by which the sinner is cleansed — and the whole story, as we say, an illustration of that Divine simplicity, and abstinence from all reliance on outward acts, which is the very essence of God’s way of salvation by Jesus Christ For if one part of the story has to be transposed into another key, there will be discord, unless the whole be so. And if we are to say leprosy was the symbol of the soul-sickness of sin, and healing the symbol of the soul-cleansing of pardon and sanctifying, then we must lift the washing in the river of Israel into the same region, and recognize in it the symbol of the soul’s act of faith, whereby our stained nature is plunged into that fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness.

Brethren, do you hold fast by the Divine simplicity of this Gospel. “It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing” — though it were the flesh that was broken for our salvation. Could we partake of it, what would */ avail to give us life? Our Lord has answered the question in that very conversation which is so often appealed to as if it taught Sacramentarian teaching, for we find there, as if mutually explanatory, or rather identical — “He that believeth on me hath everlasting life; I am that bread of life;” and “whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life.” We, who believe that the only feeding upon Christ is the occupation of mind, heart, and will with Him, His truth, His work, His commands, and that the Lord’s Supper is simply a commemorative rite which helps us to remember, and blesses us as it brings His love and His death nearer to our thoughts and our hearts — we, who thus believe, are charged with holding a “bald,” “naked,” “bare” doctrine. It is naked, with the simplicity of a homogeneous system which does not begin in the spirit and find its consummation in the flesh. As Fuller says, somewhere — “Better to be threadbare than to have vermin lurking under the nap.” And we may thank God for the naked simplicity of His Gospel — simple as all His work is simple, simple and unfathomable, with a simplicity through which shine the profoundest mysteries — and rejoice that there is one thing that saves a man, the love of God who sent His Son to die — and that there is one thing which knits a man to the source of salvation, faith in the perfect sacrifice of

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that “Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of
the world.”

But you, brethren, most of you stand in no danger such as this that I have been speaking o£ But there is danger that you and I especially stand in. There is plenty of formalism outside the limits of formal churches. There may be as much formalism in a formless Quaker ism as in the most developed ritualism; and as much heathenism in trusting to the absence of ritual as in trusting to its presence. And we, who are Nonconformists, by our very church polity are tempted to attach a false kind of value to church membership and to outward participation in Christian ordinances. We are constantly tempted to put the form in the place of the spirit We reject the notion of Sacramental Efficacy — but we may be fancying ourselves better than other people because we are members of Christian churches, and take part in their work and worship. I am afraid that some of us think that the efficacy which we deny to the bread and wine of the communion resides in our forms of worship, and in our lists of members. We do not escape from the danger of making religion a thing of sense and of externals by rejecting this or that dogma; and we all need the warning, “Be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.”

Brethren, wash, and be clean! Nothing else will bring the healing. The naked simplicity of Christ’s Gospel is but another way of saying — there is one power that pardons, saves, and there is one bond that knits us to thatl

III. Then, finally, there is connected with this consideration, and yet somewhat distinct from it, the other, the utter rejection by the Gospel of all our co-operation in our own cleansing.

The words of Naaman himself do not explicitly contain his refusal to do what was required, on the ground that it was so small a thing. But that was evidently in his mind, as well as the other grounds of offence; and it comes out distinctly in the common-sense remonstrance by which his servants brought their irascible master to reason — “If the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done /’/? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean?”

Men would be a great deal more willing to accept God’s way of salvation if it gave them some share in their own salvation. But its characteristic is that it will have none of our work — not even so much as this man had to do in his healing. He was commanded to go and wash. The lustration had no power to produce cleansing. It was only an act of obedience — not a condition of his healing, in the proper sense of that word. We are commanded to wash and be clean. Our faith, by which we come into contact with Christ’s cleansing blood, is more than Naaman’s bathing in Jordan, and it is less. It is less, inasmuch as it is not asked from us as an act of obedience which will be rewarded with forgiveness — for if that were so, “salvation by faith” would only be a more refined kind of “salvation by works.” It is more, inasmuch, as there is a real and intelligible connection betweeen our (kith and our cleansing. But our salvation, though not secured with out our faith, cannot be said, therefore, to be in any measure procured by our co-operation. “What shall we do,” said the Jews, “that we might work the works of God?” “This is the work of God,” said our Lord in answer, “that ye believe on him whom he hath sent”

The Gospel rejects our co-operation just because it demands our faith. For what is faith? Is not an essential part of it the consciousness that we can do nothing, the forsaking and going out of ourselves, accompanying the flight to Him? The under side of faith is self-abnegation; the upper side is confidence in Christ. And, therefore, the proclamation that we are justified by faith, is at the same time the absolute refusal to give men any share in their own healing.

In like manner, remember that the same principle is further established because our faith is not the means of our cure, but only the bringing of our sickness into contact with the means. God’s love in Christ, Christ’s perfect work of reconciliation, Christ’s Spirit poured out — these be the energies that heal; our faith is but lifting the eyelid that the light may fill the eye, but opening the door that the physician may enter.

And, therefore, because there is not a crevice in the whole process where self-trust can creep through, because from beginning to end God is all and man nought, our hearts rebel. We do not like to be paupers. We know thai we are starving, and we will go to Him for corn, but we like to take our money in our sacks, and we do not like to open them and find them filled with His gift, and our poor pieces of coin lying at the top. We will barter or buy heaven, but we had rather not have it as a gift. We will fast, and macerate ourselves, and go through a dreary round of observances, which are all the same in principle, whether we fix hooks in our backs and swing from them at festivals, or whether we have Protestant penances — but one thing we will not do if we can help it, and that is, cast ourselves on the undeserved, unbought mercy of God, and take pardon,- and peace, and heaven as a free gift If the prophet will only bid us do some great thing, we will try to do it But if he says to us, “wash and be clean,” we turn away. We are ready to spend our labour for that which satisfieth not; but when He offers us wine and milk, without money and without price, we will not accept it on such terms.

Brethren, Christ’s work for us must be all in all, or not at all. There must be no eking out ours with His; no saying, “Well, I do as well as I can — and for the rest I will trust in Christ!” The old cannot be patched with the new in that fashion. You must throw away the rags, and let Him clothe you wholly from head to foot — not in your own righteousness, completed with bits of His — but in His wholly — “if so be that being clothed we may not be found naked.” Powerless we are, but He is strong. Sick, but He is the healer. Leprous, but He both will and can make us clean.

It is the glory of the Gospel that it proclaims a work in which we have no share. Christ will do it all. Nay, Christ has done it all. Listen to that loud shout of

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victory which bursts from the pall of eclipse that shrouds the cross, and breaks for the last time the awful silence. The piteous cry had been heard — so mysterious and heavy with the weight of men’s sin, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” But the last word is as the triumphant voice of the Conqueror, who bears witness to Himself; and His witness is true — “It is finished,” and He gave up the ghost. “Not by works of righteousness, but by his mercy he saved us.”