Sermon preached at St Margaret of Antioch, Toxteth, 12 October 2025
2 Kings 5.1-3,7-15c
2 Timothy 2.8-15
Luke 17.11-19
Do you ever wonder about those little characters that make passing cameos in films and in books and in stories that are never named? You’re watching or listening or reading, and you think, Hang on—go back a minute. I want to know more about this fleeting character.
My favourite biblical cameo might be the man in Mark 14, when Jesus is captured in the garden of Gethsemane, and there’s just this one cryptic verse that tells us the Roman soldiers grabbed at the line garment of a young man nearby, but he managed to wriggle out of his clothes and run away naked. And I think, Wait, back up a sec—where did he come from all of a sudden, and why was he there, and where did he go, and why did Mark mention this guy all of a sudden? But we never see or hear of him again.
Sometimes we get these glimpses of unnamed characters because the original storytellers or those who eventually preserved them in writing didn’t consider them important enough to name. Sometimes it may be because they are representative of an entire group of people. Often, we can identify with these characters and place our own name in the text, and placing ourselves in the story in that way can give it new and fresh meaning.
In our reading from the Hebrew Bible this morning, there is one such unnamed character, and it is the girl who serves the king’s wife.
Our story was from a time when the Kingdom of Israel was divided, with Israel in the south and Judah in the north, and few were faithful to Yahweh—the God who had revealed himself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and who had led their people out of Egypt and through the wilderness. In this time of instability, they had experienced takeovers from various foreign kings, and at this point in the story, the northern kingdom is in the hands of the Arameans, the people who populated the land we now know as Syria.
So here we have a girl who is never named, but we know she is from among God’s chosen people, the followers of Yahweh, the Lord, and she has been captured by the invading Arameans and made a slave. We can only speculate what ordeals she had endured up to this point. She has no reason to look kindly on her captors, and so, when the commander of the king’s army—the very army that attacked her people—is struck by a skin disease, she has every reason to want him to suffer.
And yet she chooses to be merciful. She remembers the faithful prophet Elisha and tells her mistress: There is a man who can cure the king’s general. And her mistress tells the king, and the king, of course, is straight onto it, because this is one of his favourite and most valuable generals, the mighty warrior whose leadership and skill has given him his current success.
I want to know more about this girl, not least because there are many reasons she could have wanted to help Naaman, the king’s general. Did she think she could win favour for herself and improve her own situation? Was she thinking beyond that, and did she dream that, young and seemingly insignificant as she was in the great scheme of things, she could win favour for her whole people, the captive people of Israel, and improve their situation? Could her small action change the course of Israel’s history?
Or did she know God; did she know the loving kindness of Yahweh towards people and want simply to show mercy?
Either way, she did something to save an enemy. She told her captors of the prophet Elisha: He can cure you.
And when Naaman found the prophet, Elisha, too, was merciful, and without even speaking to him gave him a command so simple that Naaman thought he was having a laugh. ‘Wash and be clean.’
It seems Naaman expected the man of God to stand before him and, in grand fashion, to wave his hand and summon a miracle and declare him cured. Can you imagine if a high-up general asked a miracle of our Bishop Ruth, and she didn’t even leave Bishop’s Lodge, but instead sent word: Go have a dip in the Mersey, and you’ll be fine?
Naaman was livid until even more of these unnamed servants—likely also from the underclass of Jews that he and his people had captured—pointed out the simplicity of Elisha’s command, and urged him to try it. ‘Wash and be clean.’
And so he did, and so he was healed of his condition, and so our story becomes the story of how a wicked Aramean general converted and trusted in the God of Israel.
We do not know the name of these servants or of the slave girl who set the story in motion with her words: ‘If only my master were with the prophet, who is in Samaria—he would cure him of his leprosy.’
Yet they played a crucial part in a story that is still being told in churches and synagogues across the world some three thousand years later.
And it is a story whose lesson we learn again from our gospel reading: That the Lord is good to all who call upon him, whether Jew or Gentile. The salvation of God, revealed to us in Jesus Christ, is for every nation, and that God would extend his healing mercies to the commander of a foreign army is a sign that his love is not just for a chosen people—though chosen the Hebrew nation were and are, as a people through whom God would bless all the nations of the world. To all of us he says: Wash and be clean. This is the call to baptism, isn’t it, when God showers his grace on those he loves through the simplest of means—a scoop of water from any source, made holy because he blesses it and uses it.
The gospel this morning only underlines the point. In it, Jesus heals not one but ten lepers, in this case in a far more severe condition than that of Naaman. We know this because they cry out to Jesus only from a distance: ‘Master, have mercy on us!’
By the way, in neither case was this necessarily what later came to be called leprosy, which we now call Hanson’s disease. In ancient times the term ‘leprosy’ would have covered all sorts of skin ailments. In the case of today’s gospel passage, it was a particularly severe form that would have meant these people were declared impure and unable to mix with others. They would have been outcasts, hence their keeping their distance. Their symptoms would have given the appearance of death, which explains why it so terrified people that they would go to great lengths to exclude sufferers from among them.
And just as Elisha’s command was simple and straightforward, so was Jesus’: ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests.’ And even as they went on their way they were healed.
But only one returned to thank our Lord and praise God for his deliverance. A righteous Jew? A faithful Israelite? No. A Samaritan, a foreigner, a double outsider because not only was he leprous, but he was also of a people and place often despised and judged inferior. You might remember the Samaritan woman at the well, another double outsider because of her gender and her ethnicity, but Jesus befriended her and offered her words of hope; and we all remember the good Samaritan who proved he knew God because he alone helped the stranger when everyone else walked by.
‘Were not ten made clean?’ Jesus asks. ‘Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’
And so this beautiful story of God’s mercy tells us again what the story of Naaman told us: That God is good and merciful to all people who call on him. The Hebrew Bible, which we call the Old Testament, is about a people chosen from one nation, but they are chosen only because of their special part in God’s long-term plan—to draw all people and all nations to himself. St Paul later tells us that ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female,’ because we are ‘all one in Christ Jesus.’
In our reading from the second letter to Timothy, Paul (or more likely someone writing on his behalf) says that he has endured great hardship, including imprisonment, for the sake of this chosen people, those from every nation who are included in Christ. It is a people that includes even the leprous foreigners, like the Aramean general Naaman and the Samaritan who alone returned to fall at Jesus’ feet and thank him for his mercy.
This word of grace, of mercy, of salvation cannot be chained, Paul writes. They can lock me up, he says, but they will never lock up the word of God. This reminds me of what God said through the prophet Isaiah: ‘My word will not return to me void, but will accomplish the purpose for which I sent it.’
Some of us are outsiders. As a young man, I was an outsider in my church because I was gay. Perhaps you have been excluded because of where you come from, because of the way you speak, the colour of your skin, your family background or social class. Perhaps you’ve discovered, with much pain, that others think you’re just not good enough to move in their circles or attend their church. This is why at St Margaret’s we announce boldly that we are an inclusive church—because Jesus said all who are hungry and thirsty are welcome to eat and drink at his table. We are no longer excluded, but we are one in Christ.
Let’s remember this, too, as we are dismissed after our Eucharist. Having been fed at Christ’s table, we will be sent out in peace and in Christ’s name to ‘love and serve the Lord,’ and this means giving a place at our tables to others. That means the table in the work canteen; the kitchen or dining room table at home; the tables in the cafés and pubs you frequent.
The unnamed slave girl invited her captors to experience God’s loving kindness. She showed mercy when she and her people had been shown none. Naaman discovered God’s mercy when he observed that simple command: Wash and be clean. And we, too, in baptism were washed and made clean in ordinary water, made holy by the Spirit; that salvation will be renewed in us at the altar, as we receive Christ in ordinary bread and wine, made holy by that same Spirit; and we will go out to share that salvation with family, friends and strangers beyond the walls of this place; may we freely share Christ’s mercy, as he has freely shared with us.