With God Daily - Transactional vs. Devotional

After being miraculously healed of his leprosy, Naaman offers Elisha a lavish gift of gold, silver, and expensive clothing which the prophet utterly rejects despite Naaman’s urging. When we read these verses with our modern, Western eyes, we assume Naaman was offering a generous gift out of gratitude, and that Elisha was refusing it out of humble piety. It all appears very polite and gentlemanly. Read these verses through ancient Near Eastern eyes, however, and a different story emerges.

Once again, it’s important to understand how idolatry and pagan religion worked in the ancient world. Only then can we see what religious assumptions Naaman practiced in Syria and carried with him as he sought healing from the God of Israel. Having been deeply shaped by Christian religious values for 2,000 years, even non-Christians in our culture think of religion in terms of devotion to God and expressive worship. Simply put, for many modern people religion is deeply emotional. That was not the case for pre-Christian, non-Israelite pagan cultures. Bible scholar Nijay Gupta describes ancient pagan religion this way: “Religion was not about love or friendship with the gods; it was about maintaining a healthy circle of reciprocity… The gods didn’t want devotion…They wanted compliance and homage rendered in ways that were orderly and ritualized, practical and predictable.”

Gupta also compares pagan religion to the mafia. Just as a mob boss expected the neighborhood to pay him both money and respect in exchange for his protection, pagan deities were appeased in a similar fashion. No one liked the gods, and they certainly did not love them. The gods were to be feared and respected, and if you honored them correctly hopefully they’d keep their side of the agreement. Consider a vending machine. Receiving your Doritos has nothing to do with your feelings toward the machine. All that matters is inserting enough money and pushing the right buttons in the correct order. It’s mechanical, not emotional. Likewise, paganism was fundamentally transactional rather than devotional.

Contrast this with Israel’s God who describes himself as “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:7), and whose greatest commandment to his people was to, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:5). For the God of Israel, worship was not about appeasement, mechanics, or payment. It was about the heart. The very different values that animated pagan and Israelite worship help us see the subtext of Naaman’s interaction with Elisha.

Naaman’s extravagant offering of gold, silver, and clothing was intended as a payment to Israel’s God for his healing. As God’s representative, Naaman assumed Elisha would accept it as the proper and necessary reciprocity. Therefore, it was not genuinely a free gift offered by a heart overflowing with gratitude, but a payment understood to be obligatory for God’s blessing. I’m not saying Naaman was not thankful for his healing, only that his offering was not given for that reason. Just like we are thankful when a doctor heals our chronic back pain, but gratitude is not why we pay the bill. That part is simply expected.

And this explains Elisha’s refusal to accept Naaman’s gift. If he had taken the money, Naaman would have returned to Syria assuming Israel’s God was just like all the others—more powerful perhaps, but essentially the same; a divine vending machine or a malcontent mob boss demanding cash and respect. By rejecting any payment, Elisha forced Naaman into a religious crisis. He was provoking a revolution in Naaman’s thinking as he grappled with what it meant to encounter a God who operated like no other; a God who graciously healed foreigners without expecting or demanding anything in return.

WEEKLY PRAYER
Ignatius of Loyola (1491 - 1556)
Take, Lord, and receive all my freedom, my memory, my intelligence and my will—all that i have and possess. You, Lord, have given those things to me. I now give them back to you, Lord. All belongs to you. Dispose of these gifts according to your will. I ask only for your love and your grace, for they are enough for me.
Amen.

SCRIPTURE

Acts 8:14-23

2 Kings 5:1-27