Oh you take the high road and I’ll take the low road and you’ll be in Scotland before me, for me and my true love will never meet again…

The high road or the low road, the easy way or the hard,

We all make choices.

All our lives about which direction we wish to travel,

Choices, directions, the easy way, the hard way,

the way of forgetfulness, the way of love.

In the reading from the book of Kings today we hear about a mighty warrior who believes that the way to healing and into relationship with God must be dangerous and difficult way indeed.

Naaman is a powerful, well-respected military leader,

who is struck down with a disease that rots his flesh and strip his bones.

Naaman is a man who is frightened.

So frightened in fact, that he turns to a girl child and accepts her advice.

Let me say that again. He turns to a girl child and accepts her advice.

A girl child, a servant, a foreigner, a slave.

Unheard of.

Lets imagine for a moment the courage that this servant girl would have needed in order to speak her truth to this mighty warrior.

Imagine.

How much easier would it have been for her to not

reach out from inside herself and offer healing.

How much simpler would her life have been if she had not chosen to give her knowledge to her master?

How understandable would it have been

if she had clung on to what she knew about healing and hope

just in case she was mocked or rejected or punished?

 But she doesn’t cling on, she opens up and extends beyond herself and Naaman (perhaps to his credit, perhaps as a sign of his desperation)

follows her advice

even though it involves travelling vast distances

and going into the enemy’s camp

and asking for help, asking for healing.

A high road indeed for a mighty warrior.

But when Naaman receives the words of Wisdom from Elisha,

words simple and plain:

‘Go wash, go wash in the river’

he cannot believe that such a simple path could lead to healing.

That such a low road could lead to God.

And he is aggrieved and angered on two counts: firstly that the prophet Elisha doesn’t heal him in some sort of spectacular and public way and secondly that he is told to go and wash in a filthy foreign river. The Jordan, according to a 1931 edition of Geography of the Holy land is ‘mostly silent and black, a track of dark water between swirling between banks of mud.

 A low muddy foreign road. How could this possibly lead to wholeness?

So, the story tells us, that Naaman is about to reject Elisha’s advice and walk away when, again, wisdom comes from an unexpected source, another brave servant who says:

‘If it were a difficult task you would do it’

and Naaman, recognising the truth of this, humbles himself and is healed.

So what are we to do with this story as we sit here today, in a world far removed from the mud of streams and warriors and kings who rent their clothes when the enemy is at the gate?

And what are we to do also with the story from the gospel of another leper, another man struck down by shadow, who reaches out for help in a completely unconventional way?

There is a film called the Motorcycle Diary’s which is based upon the book by the same name which was inspired by the journey of the young Che as he travels with a friend across the Americas

These two idealistic young men are travelling toward a leper colony in order to assist with the scientific research being carried out on the small island where the lepers are isolated.

When they arrive they are issued with masks and sterilized gloves

and they are told to avoid touching

the diseased men and women who live in the colony

but the young Che discards the gloves and walks into the camp unmasked.

After only a few days working on the colony Che has organised a soccer match between the lepers and the staff

and

clean and unclean

doctors and patients 

they run and roll together

and a type of healing is taking place

which could never have occurred

if Che had taken the high road of scientific objectivity,

Like the warrior Naaman, Che wanted to do a complex thing, to take the high road to discover healing, but in humbling himself and taking off his gloves

he brought healing of another kind altogether,

a healing of laughter and dignity,

a healing of wholeness –  a soul healing.

Healing is something we all long for. Healing is something God longs for.

And healing is not about curing but about wholeness.

Let me say that again!

Healing is not about curing but about wholeness.

Both the warrior Naaman from the book of Kings and the young Che Guevara begin these stories believing that healing can only come about through complicated and spectacular acts of brain and braun, but the young leper in the story from the Gospel of Mark shows us that there is another way.

By taking the low road of humility and hope,

by reaching out and saying ‘make me clean’

the leper is opening his heart up to the living emanation

of a God who chose the humble path of incarnation

in order that we may all,

servant girl, warrior and leper alike

be made whole.

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