Naaman wished to be treated like a great man that happened to be a
leper; Elisha treated him like a leper that happened to be a great man.
'I thought, he will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the
name of the Lord his God.' The whole question about his treatment turns
on this, Whether is the important thing his disease or his dignity? He
thought it was his dignity, the prophet thought it was his disease. And
so he served him as he would have served any one else that in similar
circumstances, and for a like necessity, had come to him.
And now, if you will generalise that, it just comes to this--that
Christianity brushes aside all the surface differences of men, and goes
in its treatment of them straight to the central likenesses, the things
which, in all mankind, are identical. There are the same wants, the
same sorrows, the same necessity for the same cleansing beneath the
queen's robes and the peer's ermine, the workman's jacket and the
beggar's rags.
Whatever differences of culture, of station, of idiosyncrasy there may
be, these are but surface and accidental. We are all alike in this,
that we 'have sinned, and come short of the glory of God'; and our
Great Physician, in His great remedy, insists upon treating us all as
patients, and not as this, that, or the other, kind of patients. The
cholera, when it lays hold of ladies and gentlemen, deals with them in
precisely the same fashion that it does when it lays hold of waifs on
the dunghill; and a wise doctor will treat the Prince of Wales just as
he will treat the Prince of Wales's stable-boy. Christianity has
nothing to say, in the first place, to the accidents that separate us
one from the other, but insists on looking at us all as standing on the
one level and partaking of the one characteristic. We may be wise or
foolish, we may be learned or ignorant, we may be rich or poor, we may
be high or low, we may be barbarian or civilised, but we are all
sinners. The leprosy runs through us all, according to the diagnosis of
Christianity, and our Elisha deals with Naaman as he deals with the
poorest footboy in Naaman's cavalcade who is afflicted with the same
disease.
Now that rubs against our self-importance; a great many of us would be
quite willing to go to heaven, but we do not like to go in a common
caravan. We want to have a compartment to ourselves, and to travel in a
manner becoming our position. We are quite willing to be healed, but we
would like to be healed with due deference. You are an educated man, a
student; you do not like to take the same place as the most unlettered,
and to feel that the common fact of sin puts you, in a very solemn
respect, upon the level of these narrow foreheads and unlettered
people. And so some of you turn away because Christianity, with such
impartiality and persistency, insists upon the identity of the fact of
sin in us all, and passes by the little diversities on which we plume
ourselves, and which part us the one from the other. Dear brethren, I
am sure that some of my audience have been kept away from the gospel by
this humbling characteristic of it, that at the very beginning it
insists on bringing us all into the one category; and I venture to ask
you to ponder with yourselves this question, Is it not wise, is it not
necessary that the physician should look only at the disease and think
nothing of all the other facts of the patient's character or life?
Surely, surely, it is a fact that we are transgressors, and surely it
is a fact that if we be transgressors that is the most important thing
about us--far more important than all these diversities of which I have
been speaking. They are skin-deep, this is the central truth, that we
have souls which ought to stand in a living relation of glad obedience
to our Father in heaven; and which, alas! do stand in an attitude often
of sulky alienation, often of indifference, and not seldom of
rebellion. If so, then it is both wise and kind to deal with that
solemn fact first. In wisdom and in mercy Christianity deals with all
men as sinners, needing chiefly to be healed of that disease. 'The
Scripture hath concluded all under sin'--shut up the whole race as in a
great chamber, that so cleansing and forgiveness might reach them all.
They are gathered together as patients in a hospital are gathered, that
their sickness may be medicined and their wounds dressed.
For this impartiality of the gospel, putting us all on one level, and
its determination to deal with us all as sinners, is but the other side
of, and the preparation for, that blessed universality of a sacrifice
for all, and a gospel for the whole world. Do not quarrel with your
physic because the Physician insists upon dealing with you as sick men.
II. Then take another of the thoughts that come out of the incident
before us. God's cure puts the messengers of the cure well away in the
background.
Naaman, heathen-like, wanted something sensuous for his confidence in
the prophet's cure to lay hold upon. If the prophet would only have
come out, and done like the sorcerers and magic-workers of whom he had
had experience; if he would have come weaving mystical incantations,
and calling upon the God whom he worshipped, but whom Naaman did not,
and making passes with his hands over the leprous places--then there
would have been something for his sense to build upon, and he would
have been ready to believe in the prophet's power to cure. But that was
the very thing which the prophet did not want him to believe in. Elisha
desired to conceal himself, and to make God's power prominent. He
wished to cure Naaman's soul of the leprosy of idolatry as well as to
cure his body; and we see, in the sequel of the story, that the very
simplicity of the means enjoined and the absence of any human agency,
which at first staggered the sensuous nature and offended the pride of
Naaman, at last led him to see and confess that there was no God in all
the earth but in Israel. Therefore the prophet keeps in the background.
His part is not to cure, but to bring God's cure. He is only a voice.
He brings the sick man and God's prescription face to face, and there
leaves him. Naaman would have liked to force him into the place of a
magician, in whom miracle-working power resided. Elisha will only take
the place of a herald who proclaims how God's power may be brought to
heal. So men have always sought to turn the messengers of God's cure
into miracle-workers. Making the ministers of God's word into priests
who by external acts convey grace and forgiveness, is a superstition
that has its roots deep in human nature. It is not that the priests
have made themselves so much as that the people have made the priests.
Here is an instance in a rude form of the tendency which has been at
work in all generations, and has been the corruption of Christianity
from the beginning, and is doing mischief every day--the tendency to
place one's confidence in a man who is supposed to be, in some
mysterious manner, the bearer of a grace that will cure and cleanse.
And the prophet's position in our story brings out very clearly the
position which all Christian ministers hold. They are nothing but
heralds, their personality disappears, they are merely a voice. All
that they have to do is to bring men into contact with God's own word
of command and promise, and then to vanish.
Christianity has no 'priests,' Christianity has no 'sacraments.'
Christianity has no external rites which bring grace or help except in
so far as by their aid the soul is brought into contact with the truth,
and by meditation and faith is thus made capable of receiving more of
Christ's Spirit. Our only commission is to bring to you God's message
of how you may be healed. When we have said, 'Wash, and be clean,' as
plainly, earnestly, and lovingly as we can, we have done all our
appointed office. We are heralds, and nothing more. Our business is to
preach, not to do rites, or minister sacraments. Our business is to
preach, not to argue. We are neither priests nor professors, but
preachers. We have to deliver the message given to us faithfully. We
have to ring out the proclamation loudly. The virtue of a town crier is
that he make people hear and understand. The virtue of a messenger is
that he repeats precisely what he was told. And a Christian minister
has to lift up his voice and not be afraid, to see to it that his
speech be plain, and that it do not overlay the message with fripperies
of ornament, or affectations, or personalities, and to plead earnestly
and lovingly with men to come to the divine Healer. John Baptist's
description of himself is true of them. With rare self-abnegation, he
would only reply to the question, 'Who art thou?' with 'I am a voice.'
His personality was nothing. His message was all. A musical string
cannot be seen as it vibrates. So the man should be lost in his
proclamation. We are heralds and nothing more, and the more we keep in
the background and the less our hearers depend on us, the better. If
you want priests who will 'call on the name of their God, and wave
their hands over the place,' and convey grace and healing to you by
anything that they do for or to you, you will have to go beyond the
limits of New Testament Christianity to find them. So men quarrel with
their medicine because their cure is purely a spiritual process,
depending on spiritual forces, and sense cries out for sacred rites and
persons to be the channels of God's healing.