But He Was a Leper

Competence, Shame, and the Mercy of God

Over the next few posts, I want to move slowly through the story of Naaman in 2 Kings 5. Not to extract quick principles, but to pay attention to the pattern. Everything we need to understand about real and lasting change is here — pride, desperation, overlooked voices, resisted instruction, reluctant obedience, and even unexpected mercy. The story is compact, but it is not simple. If we move too quickly through it, we will miss ourselves in it. Sadly, most of us have been trained to live sermon to sermon, moving far too fast for healthy and lasting spiritual change.

The story opens with a list of accolades most of us would gladly accept for ourselves. “Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Syria, was a great man with his master and in high favor, because by him the LORD had given victory to Syria. He was a mighty man of valor…” These are the literal first sentences of the chapter. It’s hard to improve on that résumé. He is competent, decorated, trusted — the kind of man other men follow and leaders depend on. He has proven himself publicly, and that’s something I’ve learned, through conversations behind closed doors, most of us are chasing. And then, shockingly, this first sentence turns: “…but he was a leper,” it says.

That may be one of the most direct sentences in Scripture. The narrative doesn’t minimize either side of it. It doesn’t quietly reduce Naaman so that the story makes more spiritual and emotional sense. He really is an accomplished man. He really has been used by God to bring military victories. And he really is physically ill with an unmanageable disease. There is something in him that is spreading beneath the surface. Real change does not begin with collapse; it begins with contradiction.

We can be effective and still infected.

We can be admired and still deteriorating.

We can be spiritually articulate and still untouched in the places that matter most.

Recent headlines reporting those granted public spiritual authority are proof of this. But, it’s important to say here that we didn’t need any more proof. Before these men, there was Jimmy Swaggart, and before him, there was King David. How long before we stop judging a spiritual life by its cover?

Naaman’s story is the biblical solution to this repetitive problem. It forces us to acknowledge this reality. No way around it.

Leprosy in the ancient world was more than a medical diagnosis. It meant social isolation. It meant that your body itself was a source of public shame. It marked you as unsafe, contagious, unfit to be with others. And Naaman carried it under his armor. There is something about this part of the story that hits very close to home. Many of us have built lives strong enough to compensate for what is quietly wrong. We lead, provide, and produce, but beneath all of it is something we don’t quite know how to name — resentment, restlessness, chronic dissatisfaction, the number of underpinnings is as large as individuals. So, we manage it. We outperform it. We hide it underneath competence. But it’s still there. I don’t write this as accountability. I write it to let you know that you are not alone. I want my writing, if nothing else, to help us all see our shared strategies. To me, this is how we illuminate the way out.

Curt Thompson writes in The Soul of Desire

Shame has a way of disintegrating our neural networks and the story we tell about the world and our relationships along the way.

Naaman’s leprosy is physical, but the pattern underneath it is not foreign to us. Something is organizing him from beneath the surface, something that cannot be solved by another military victory. The text moves quickly past the diagnosis and introduces someone else surprising — not a king not a prophet, but a servant girl — two words that in the ancient world meant marginalized, limited in options and influence. “She said to her mistress, ‘Would that my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.’” 2 Kings 5:3 It’s a sentence that is as much innocent as it is enthusiastic.

Just like the Bible, that is all we are told. She is unnamed. She has been taken captive from her homeland. Her life has been disrupted by Naaman’s people. She lives in a household not by choice but by conquest. I actually can’t imagine what this must have been like for her. Even still, she speaks hope into the very home that made her a captive. The first voice God uses to move Naaman towards healing is a young, enslaved girl from his enemy’s land. Without her, Naaman remains great — and diseased. When I first read this story with fresh eyes, meaning less focused on the end state of healing, this detail seemed very, very important. Let me explain.

We prefer that change come through someone impressive and degreed, someone on staff somewhere.

We would rather hear it from a conference stage than from the margins of our own house. But the story refuses that arrangement. I’ve had this happen to me — my 15 and 18 year old say something that stops me in my spiritual tracks. It’s unnerving. The servant girl does not perform or argue. She does not shame him. She just speaks what she knows.

There is a prophet.

There is hope.

You do not have to stay this way.

That is the first spot mercy shows up in this story. A long time before he is healed, he is invited.

Eugene Peterson’s description of Abraham, a hero of the faith as he’s often called, feels like it sets us up well here. He writes:

Abraham was not called the friend of God because he was singled out for special benevolent attention by God, a kind of teacher’s pet. He did not live a charmed life. He was called the friend of God because he experienced God accurately and truly. He lived as God’s friend. He responded as God’s friend. He believed that God was on his side, and he lived like it.

The servant girl is irrelevant in every measurable way, and yet she is the hinge of the story. Healing enters through a voice that does not carry status. That detail unsettles us more than we might admit. Most of us say we want healing, but we often resist the way God begins it. We do not like receiving from those we consider beneath us. We do not like being interrupted by a small voice. We don’t like the suggestion that someone with less power might see something we don’t. I’ve seen many people pass on healing because someone they didn’t respect at the time pointed the way. This is not only elitist, but it’s also deadly.

Thankfully, Naaman does listen, at least enough to move. He goes to his king. He gathers silver and gold. He carries letters of introduction. He approaches the prophet referenced by the little girl through political channels. He handles the invitation in the only way he knows how — through structures of power. That too feels familiar. We take a simple word of hope and immediately try to manage it, organize it, and formalize it. As a content creator, I know this tension well. But beneath all of that activity is something more basic: a man who is tired of being unclean, a man who cannot defeat this enemy. For all his strength, this is a problem he just can’t solve with his own weathered solution sets. July 2, 2025, I had a moment just like this. It’s still too soon for me to adequately describe how that’s changed me, what that level of desperation does to a man.

Naaman is strong, but he is not yet whole. He has authority, but he does not have health. His outer life and inner condition aren’t in alignment. This misalignment is where this story begins. See, if we rush too quickly to the miracle, we miss the pattern this story shows us. The pattern begins with contradiction — greatness and disease in the same body. It moves through an overlooked voice — truth spoken by someone without leverage or power. It requires a willingness to move before understanding what will be required as we go.

At this point in the story, Naaman is still unhealed. He is still carrying the infection. He is still operating within the same assumptions about how power works. But something has shifted. He has heard that he does not have to remain this way. It is one thing to live with a wound when you believe it is permanent. It is another to discover that healing is possible, but may require surrendering the very posture that made you successful.

This is where real change begins. Not at the river, but at the moment we allow ourselves to believe that our hidden condition does not have to define us, and that the voice calling us toward healing may not come from where we expected. Naaman is still armored, still decorated, and respected. But the story has already exposed him. And that exposure is not condemnation. It is mercy.

So what do we do with this?

We don’t rush to the river yet. That comes later. For now, we ask a simpler question: Where is the “I’d rather not” in my own life? Where does competence coexist with quiet deterioration? Where have I built strength over something I have not actually addressed?

And then we ask something even harder: Whose voice have I dismissed?

The story has not yet required Naaman to humble himself publicly. It has only required him to listen. Before he washes, he receives. Before he obeys, he considers. That may be where many of you are right now. Not at the point of action, but at the point of awareness.

The mercy of God in this first part of the story is not the final healing. It is the exposure. To see clearly without being crushed. To be named without being rejected. To be invited before being corrected. Naaman is still armored, still decorated, still respected. But the story has already begun to rebuild him — not through humiliation, but through hope. And I hope that’s what it does for you as well, because God doesn’t reserve this kind of intervention for Naaman alone all those years ago. He offers it freely and generously to all who are willing to listen.