The General Who Dipped Seven Times

Elisha had been carrying Elijah's old cloak around Israel for a while now, and everybody knew where to find the prophet. Everybody, it turned out, except the king.

North of Israel, in the kingdom of Aram, lived a great general named Naaman. (The Bible says the LORD had given him his victories, though Naaman did not know that yet.) But Naaman had leprosy, a skin disease with white, scaly patches, and no doctor in Aram could cure it.

A girl from Israel, carried off by raiders, worked as a servant for Naaman's wife. "I wish my master would go to the prophet in Samaria!" she said. "He would heal him."

So Naaman set off with horses, chariots, a heap of silver and gold, and a letter from his king. (The silver alone weighed about as much as four grown men.)

The letter asked the king of Israel to heal Naaman. The king tore his robes. "Am I God? Can I kill people and bring them back to life? He is trying to start a war!"

Elisha sent word: "Send the man to me. Then he will know there is a prophet in Israel."

So the chariots came clattering up to Elisha's house, and stopped. Naaman waited. The door stayed shut. Out came a messenger: "Go and wash in the Jordan River seven times, and your skin will be healed."

Naaman was furious. "I thought he would come out and call on his God and wave his hand over the sore! The rivers back home are better than all the water in Israel!" And off he drove in a rage.

His servants hurried after him. "Father," they said, "if the prophet had told you to do something hard, wouldn't you have done it? So why not this, when all he says is 'Wash and be clean'?"

Naaman turned his chariots toward the Jordan.

Down he went into the brown water while his servants watched. Once. Splash. Twice. Three, four, five, six. Still scaly. On the seventh time he came up, looked at his arms, and laughed. His skin was clean and new, like a young boy's.

He rode straight back, and this time Elisha came out. "Now I know there is no God in all the world except in Israel!" Naaman said. "Please, take a gift."

"As surely as the LORD lives, I will not take a thing," said Elisha.

Instead Naaman asked for two mule-loads of Israel's dirt, to worship the LORD on back home. (It may be the strangest souvenir in the Bible.)

Elisha's servant Gehazi could not bear to watch all that silver roll away. He ran after Naaman, asked for silver in Elisha's name, and hid it. Elisha knew. "Naaman's leprosy will cling to you," he said, and Gehazi walked out with skin as white as snow.

But the Jordan had washed one man, one time. Many in Israel had the same sickness then, and stayed sick. And nobody touched a man with that sickness. Even Elisha had kept his door shut.

Nearly nine hundred years later, a young man from Nazareth waded into that same brown water, though he had nothing to wash away. In his own town he reminded the crowd that God had healed Naaman the outsider, and they got so angry they tried to throw him off a cliff. Later a man covered in the white sickness knelt before him. "If you want to, you can make me clean."

He did not send a messenger. He reached out and touched the man. "I want to," said Jesus. "Be clean!"