Prayer
God of compassion, soften the edges of my heart and erase the boundaries I put up to limit the reach of your compassion. Make me an instrument of your healing peace in this world. Amen.
Key Scripture
2 Kings 5
“And the little girl said to her mistress, ‘If only my lord could be in the service of the prophet in Samaria—he could heal him of his affliction!’” (2 Kings 5:3, author’s translation)
“And Naaman went down, and he dipped in the Jordan seven times, according to the word of the man of God. And his flesh returned to him like the flesh of a little boy. Naaman was clean!” (2 Kings 5:14, author’s translation)
Main Point
The little Israelite girl, captured and enslaved by Naaman, the general of Aram’s army, demonstrates the boundless and boundaryless character of God’s compassion by offering Naaman a way to find healing from his skin affliction. Not only so, but she models for him an alternative to the destructive, enemy-making, might-makes-right approach to power he embodies, inviting him to experience the transforming power of compassion, vulnerability, and love.
Introduction to the Little Girl
The little girl is easy to overlook when reading the dramatic narrative told in 2 Kings 5. The tale’s outsized male characters tend to steal the spotlight—Naaman the Aramean general with a skin affliction, Elisha the enigmatic prophet in Israel, the powerful yet impotent kings of Aram and Israel, and Elisha’s greedy and short-sighted servant Gehazi. Yet the unnamed orphan girl—stolen from her homeland by Naaman’s soldiers and enslaved in Naaman’s own home—is the unheralded hero of this story and its most magnanimous character. In the face of trauma, violence, capture, and dislocation, she not only demonstrates profound resilience, but also radical compassion, generosity, wisdom, and love.
She appears in just two verses in the whole chapter, yet she is the most important character in the story. Without her prophetic insight, Naaman would never have found healing, Elisha would have missed an opportunity to demonstrate the power of free grace, the Jordan River would have lost a chance to baptize an image bearer, Jesus would have been left without the perfect illustration for his first sermon (see Luke 4:23-28), and we would be bereft of a compelling story celebrating the healing power of the radical, scandalous, prodigal nature of God’s compassion.
Digging Deeper
As the storyteller establishes the opening scene and introduces the key players, Naaman and the little girl are set up as absolute contrasts. Naaman is called by name, she is nameless; he is a “great man,” she is a “little girl”; he is a leader, she is a servant; he is a general, she is a captive; he is an Aramean, she is an Israelite.
Digging deeper into their respective characters, though, we see they each represent fundamentally different ways of being in the world, and the conflict of the drama revolves around which one is truer to the heart of God. Naaman represents the way of power, violence, and “might makes right.” He is a taker; his worldview is dominated by the act of taking. For him, capturing and enslaving children from enemy nations is perfectly acceptable behavior. The little girl represents a radically different form of power. She is a giver. She embodies the way of peace, expressed through vulnerability, courage, wisdom, and compassion. She believes in a world in which everyone is worthy of receiving the scandalous and prodigal love of God—even her own captor.
Her compassion is not Stockholm Syndrome—the condition in which victims bond with their abusers. It is a demonstration of the unconditional, and sometimes uncomfortable, boundlessness of God’s love, what Father Greg Boyle calls “the power of boundless compassion.” In his 35 years of working with gangs through Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, California, “Father G” teaches that we are to be in the world who God is—and “God is compassionate, loving kindness.” If this is our calling, “then, somehow, our compassion has to find its way to vastness.” And this vastness truly is without limits. No one can be excluded from it. The little girl’s compassion transformed Naaman’s life.
Before his life could be transformed, though, Naaman had some unlearning to do. Eventually he arrives at Elisha’s house, but Naaman is still puffed up by his own importance and expects Elisha to serve him (exactly the opposite of what the little girl said!). Elisha refuses to play along. He sends a messenger to tell Naaman the way to healing is to wash seven times in the Jordan. Naaman is not only incensed, he’s confused. In Naaman’s world, you work hard, get ahead, and take what’s yours. Nothing is easy, and nothing is free. Only the powerful survive, and only the ruthless get ahead.
Elisha’s words point Naaman in the same direction the little girl’s message had pointed him: toward healing and a new way of being—a way marked by generosity, vulnerability, and love. And with a subtle yet profound repetition, the storyteller demonstrates Naaman’s transformation after his baptism in the Jordan. When Naaman rises from the water for the seventh time he finds his flesh like that of a “little boy.” In the Hebrew, “little boy” and “little girl” are the same word in different forms. Naaman has become like the little girl! She was the model for his healing.
Perhaps Jesus recalled this moment when the disciples, obsessed with the kind of power Naaman possessed, asked who was greatest in the kingdom. Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like a child, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). Naaman, like the little girl before him, is now on the path to being in the world who God is.
#SheIsCalled and We Are Called
The healing this path holds—for Naaman as well as for each of us—is to transform us from takers into givers. At the beginning of the story, Naaman takes everything he can get his hands on, even human beings. At the end of the story, Gehazi, Elisha’s servant, does the same, taking from Naaman whatever he can get his hands on. Elisha exposes Gehazi’s greed, and just as Naaman transforms into the little girl at the Jordan, Gehazi transforms into Naaman, taking on his skin disease as an outward sign of an inward disposition.
We, too, are takers. It’s no surprise, as we are immersed in a culture of taking. In fact, American English barely lets us go five minutes without taking something or other. We take a walk, take a break, take a nap, take a bus, take a drink, take a bite, take a picture, take a vacation, take our pills, take a class. I wonder how this linguistic immersion normalizes other, more damaging habits of taking, embedding them in the status quo and blinding us to how often we take what is not ours.
We are more like Naaman and Gehazi than we’d like to believe. The little girl offers us compassion, too. She sees us in the midst of our struggles to make our way in the world, and she points us to what is most urgent: to receive the grace of God, to lean into the way of service, to embrace our vulnerability. Ultimately, she points us to Jesus, the one who broke the bread and gave it to us, inviting us not to take it, but to receive it, and to go and give it to everyone we meet.
Conclusion
Initially, Naaman felt Elisha’s message to “wash in the Jordan” was beneath a man of his stature. As a self-sufficient man, he must earn his healing through a feat of strength or win it through a demonstration of valor. But his servants convinced him to give it a try anyway, and the rest is history (vv. 11-13).
What is the thing that feels “below” you that God keeps nudging you toward—something that feels insignificant or unworthy of your time and effort—which may be the gateway to deeper healing and wholeness? In what ways might you, like Naaman, be misinterpreting God’s nudgings by assuming it’s the purity of the water or the majesty of the river that will unleash God’s power of healing and goodness in your life? Where do you need to let go of your pride, remove your armor of self-sufficiency, and step down into the Jordan to receive the abundance of God?
