The Syrian Naaman, whose story is contained in the chapter from which our text is taken, was a type of the world. As race answereth to face in water, so the heart of man to man; and we cannot read this story without discovering in it the history of ourselves. It needs no argument to convince men that they are sinners, They all acknowledge it--at times with sorrow and grief. They feel the corruption of their own hearts, how incapable they are to live up to their own standard, much more to attain perfection. While they think they are still masters, they have became slaves, and sin holds them in an inexorable grasp; its chains are iron. You have all seen such a man, perhaps the intemperate, striving with tears and sighs against the evil that beggars his family and ruins himself, and alas! how often striving in vain. Then perhaps, when you have found how vain is human help, when you have learned by painful experience how true is that Scripture doctrine of man s inability to reform and save himself, you take up your Bible or you go to church, with the inquiry in your heart, if not on your lips, what must I do to be saved? Go, wash in Jordan seven times, is the reply you hear. Repent of your sins, and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ; use the means of grace God has placed in your hands, the sacraments and ordinances of the Church. Like Naaman, you are wroth, and go away. You thought surely the prophet would come out to you. You expected, or at least you wished, some miraculous call--that there might be some wonderful interposition of Providence on your behalf; that, like St. Paul, you might see a light from heaven or hear a voice; that, like Cornelius, you might see a vision, or, like the wife of Pilate, dream a dream. So doing, you would give the true reason of your present refusal and delay. You would answer the question of Naaman’s servants “My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it?” Simply to wash and be clean, simply to repent and believe, to seek grace in the waters of baptism, or in the broken body and shed blood of their dying Lord, or in the laying on of hands, gives them no credit. It adds nothing to their glory; it undervalues, as they think, the Abana and Pharpar of their love. It mortifies their vanity and humbles their pride; for it shows them that, so long as they refuse to look at thebrazen serpent or to step into the troubled pool, so long they are not only wretched, but helpless; so long must they be content to move on, great men and honourable it may be, but lepers still. It takes away all pretence for human merit; it is mercy and grace, and not a deserved gift. It robs the rivers of Damascus of their pretended virtue, and remits the world to that fountain in which alone Judah and Jerusalem may wash; which, taking its rise in the blood of theCross, has extended its cleansing streams into all lands. It is offered freely and without price, and men refuse to purchase; it is the gift of grace, and they will not accept it. What we need is to realise the nature of our own hearts, and to feel that God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble, that obedience is better than sacrifice, and that the humble and contrite spirit is with God of greater price than the rivers of Damascus, or all that the wit of man can devise. (G. F. Cushman,D. D.)
Relation between master and servants
Naaman must have been a considerate master, and his servants must have been reliable men, or that sensible and timely remonstrance of theirs would have been impossible. It implied friendly relations on both sides. Among the ruins of ancient Rome was discovered not long since a broken urn containing some half-burned bones. They were really the ashes of one who, as appeared from the inscription on the tablet, had belonged to the Imperial Household, and whose virtues as a faithful, honest, and devoted servant the emperor himself had taken means to record. Near the “grey metropolis of the North” is a cemetery, where can be seen a monumental stone, erected by the late Queen Victoria to the memory of an attached and honoured domestic. The gifted John Ruskin once wrote: “There is no surer test of the quality of a nation than the quality of its servants”
