The Healing Power of Human Connection: Elisha's Example (Advent II: II Kings 5:1-17)
Miller, Mary Jane. A Mother's Love Holds the World, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.
The dominant economy has been for a long time top-down with the more powerful commandeering ample resources for themselves at the expense of the vulnerable and powerless. In biblical memory that top-down leverage is embodied in the food monopoly policies of Pharaoh, then adopted by his son-in-law, Solomon. As James C. Scott, Against the Grain: a Deep History of the Earliest States, has shown, this top-down practice is even more ancient and more wide-spread. In biblical reference, the royal lineage in Israel after Solomon continued the practice of top-down economics that permitted extravagant luxury and impressive building projects that required heavy taxation, assessment of tribute and cheap labor. The single exception in this royal practice is King Josiah, but his reform movement in II Kings 22-23 was too little, too late. The extravagant self-indulgence of the ownership class was a ready and continuing target for prophetic critique.
The royal practice of confiscation, usurpation, and accumulation is steady and ongoing—until it is disrupted. It is sharply and shockingly contrasted to the economic assumptions and practice of Elisha who is rooted in old traditions of covenantal neighborliness. His economic practice is quite in contrast to that of top-down surplus management by the kings. In II Kings 5:1-27 we have a narrative about Elisha’s counter-economy. The story concerns a high-ranking general in the enemy army of Syria, Naaman. He is beset by leprosy, a disease that rendered him helpless and jeopardized his high social standing and influence. Leprosy was indeed a great class leveler because it reduced everyone and anyone to a social role of excluded outsider. The desperate general will seek help wherever he can find it. On the basis of a rumor from an Israelite slave girl, the general goes, with his impressive entourage, to Israel to seek help:
He went, taking with him ten talents of silver, sixteen shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments (v. 5).
The narrative and the horizon of the leprous general are dominated by the management and manipulation of wealth, here “gold, silver, and garments.” He seeks help from the nameless Israelite king in Samaria; he is brusquely rebuffed. At the last instant, “Elisha, the man of God” intervenes and invites the general to come see him. The narrative culminates in verse 25 with a declaration that this “man of God” had healed the Syrian general so that “his flesh was liked the flesh of a young boy” (v. 14). He smelled as good and fresh as a baby! He was “clean.”
Unfortunately, many of our expositions stop with the outcome of verse 14. For our purposes, however, what follows in verses 15-27 is of immense interest and importance. The Syrian general is fully committed to a money economy. Of course he would be, with his “ten talents of silver and six thousand shekels of gold.” He wants to pay his way. He is no free-loader, but is quite capable of paying for services rendered. After all, that is how it would work back home in Syria. And that is how it would work in most places in the world. Such quid pro quo arrangement, however, does not function with Elisha, because he is embedded in a quite alternative practice. He refuses the payment offered by the general.
As the Lord lives, whom I serve, I will accept nothing! (v. 16)
He not only refuses to accept payment, but utters the name of the God of the neighborly economy. In the world of YHWH, healing is not for sale. The general persists; the prophet steadfastly refuses payment. Elisha dismisses the general with his blessing: “Go in peace” (v. 19).
But the narrative has not yet finished. In the next episode Gehazi, servant of Elisha, is featured. He reckons that Elisha, his master, has been much too generous. He resolves to pursue the general who is on his way home in order to “get something out of him.” Gehazi, like the general, does not figure that such wondrous healing should be free and without due payment. The general and the servant parley. The servant asks for a talent of silver for the needy company of prophets. The general, in a generous mood, tops the request by giving him more than he asked:
“Please accept two talents.” He urged him, and tied up two talents of silver in two bags, with two changes of clothing and gave them to two of his servants who carried them in front of Gehazi (v. 23).
The general has no reluctance about paying for his healing, and is perhaps relieved that he is not to be a “charity case.” The general and the servant together occupy a world of quid pro quo. In that world the ones with gold and silver can purchase what they need, or what they want. Neither of them has any concern for those who lack the silver and gold for what they need. The narrative is staged to make clear that Elisha is indeed the “odd man out.” He is the one, the only one in the narrative, who dissents from the world of cost and payment. The narrative never explains why this is so, why the prophet stands in sharp contrast to the servant and the general. But we know why. We know that Elisha is grounded in and defined by the rule of YHWH, the creator God who gives life abundant without bargaining or money or price (see Isaiah 55:1-2). The wrap-up of the narrative in verses 25-27 posits the end result for Gehazi in his calculation. Elisha rebukes his servant for his retrieval of payment:
Is this a time to accept money or to accept clothing, olive orchards, and vineyards, sheep and oxen, male and female slaves? (v. 6)
No, this is not a time for commoditization. Elisha gives a hint that this time is not in any way a special or exceptional time. It is, in his reckoning, like every time. No doubt the prophet would aver that there is not now and not ever a time when it is appropriate to redefine healing as a monetary transaction. Healing cannot be monetized in the world of God’s good abundance. Rather healing is a wonder that happens among neighbors. The outcome for the greedy servant is leprosy, that is, social rejection and exclusion (v. 27). The servant gets the future that had come upon the general. Elisha manages to show that in the world in which the creator God governs, God will not be mocked. A world of quid pro quo will always, without fail, yield an outcome inimical to the creator. The generosity of the general and the greed of the servant together occupy a world defined by cost and payment.
But Elisha is fully at work and fully effective outside of that monetary system that renders immense advantage to some and imposes acute disadvantage on others. The narrative finishes without commentary or explanation. But it is all there to see. It is no wonder that Elisha disrupts the royal recital in the Books of Kings. He disrupts the narrative, just as he disrupts our economic imagination, as he performs alternative assumptions concerning God’s goodness and abundance.
It requires no great imagination to see that we continue to act out this same dramatic clash of scarcity and abundance. It turns out that “abundance” and “scarcity” are not determined by measurable, quantifiable amounts. They are rather, one way or the other, our most elemental assumptions of what the world is like. The assumptions of quid pro quo monetary transaction is grounded in scarcity that is reflective of a closed world in which there are no more gifts to be given; there is only the management and administration of what is at hand. Conversely, the assumption of abundance is the conviction that the world continues to be open as God’s creation. There is a continued giving of new gifts and new resources that invite management and administration that expects to process always-arriving fresh resources and so is open to new social possibilities.
The dominant economy is governed by the scarcity of a closed universe. The counter-practice of abundance is based in the conviction of a world of neighborly gifts. In this regard I commend a British film, The Bank of Dave. It is a true story of a businessman in Yorkshire who from his business began making informal loans to his neighbors who were in need. Over time he got the notion to start a bank that would serve the neighborhood. In order to get be able to get his new bank underway Dave had to fend off the resistance of the big banks in London that had no notion of “serving neighbors” The film exhibits the way in which “Dave,” in his tenacious insistence, was able to open such a bank that has prospered in its commitment to serving the community. Dave has done, in his context, what Elisha had done in his work amid a community of need. That is, generosity toward those without resources is the essential work of humanness. It is, however, certain that such work will evoke great resistance and hostility from monetized interests that readily see such modest initiatives as a threat to top-down systems of monetary control.
Thus the issue is joined—with Elisha and with Dave—and everywhere. It is an issue between a top-down economy that serves monetized interests, and a neighborly economy that treats neighbors as legitimate partners in common concerns. In the Elisha narrative, the issue is joined around health care. But it could as well be joined around housing, or education, or jobs. And of course, the issue is joined in the life and ministry of Jesus who expended his transformative power on behalf of the undeserving who were left bereft by the temple system of economic exchange. Advent is a season wherein the church can reflect on this either/or of top-down management or neighborly generosity. The top-down system has a stake in asserting failure as guilt. Thus Jesus parries his opponents by asserting that two very different verdicts are in fact equivalent: “forgiveness of sin” or “stand up and walk” (Mark 2:19). After the manner of Elisha, Jesus was about empowering people to full restoration in a commonly shared human future. For that to happen, it is required that we step outside any quid pro quo calculation. Advent is a great moment in which the church can consider in serious ways the gospel-rooted alternative. It is an alternative that pertains, variously, to our personal discipline and to our public policies. The counter-movement of Elisha and of Jesus is a challenge to top-down systems for the sake of human restoration. This alternative is an invitation to a different risky way in the world. The alternative of Elisha bewilders both the general and the servant boy. But this alternative rings true when we consider our common vulnerability and our capacity to share common resources. No wonder the top-down authorities rallied to eliminate such a movement with its dangerous transformative potential. In Advent we reflect on the way in which this transformative initiative led to a Good Friday execution.
