Reflection: God's Reason for Being Unreasonable (February 12, 2012)

The Sixth Sunday After Epiphany
2 Kings 5:1-14; 1 Cor. 10:31-11:1; Mark 1:40-45

Let's face it, God can be very unreasonable at times — at least to people who consider themselves to be reasonable. A good case in point is found in today's Old Testament reading. God worked things out so that the commander of the Syrian armed forces would go to Israel expecting to be cured of a disease. It didn't matter to God that Syria was a powerful enemy of Israel. He also didn't seem to care that Naaman learned about the hope for a cure through an Israelite girl who has taken as a slave during a raid by his forces. And it also didn't bother God that Naaman had an incurable disease. However, the king of Israel, who was a reasonable person, was seriously troubled by these things. He reasoned that the king of Syria was looking for an excuse to attack Israel. He reasoned that no one in Israel could cure Naaman. And he reasoned that there was no way out of this dilemma. The king's problem was that he was a reasonable person with an unreasonable God.

Hundreds of years after Naaman, Jesus encountered a leper who was willing to set aside reason and act in faith. "If you want to," he said to Jesus, "You can heal me of this incurable disease." In love and compassion, Jesus touched the leper and healed him. Then Jesus told the healed man to keep quiet about this miraculous healing. How unreasonable! Yet, when we see how he adversely affected Jesus' ministry by telling people about being cured of leprosy, we begin to understand the wisdom of God's unreasonableness.

While we can see how these two lepers should have accepted God at His Word, it's much more challenging for us to embrace God's unreasonableness in our lives. We want things to make sense to us before we commit our money, time, energy, and selves to an endeavor. When God works something in our lives that is confusing or confounding — something that seems to go against what we consider reasonable — we struggle with being faithful. We want answers to our questions and assurances for our doubts. We can see more reasonable (and palatable) options and want to know why we can't pursue them. We might be angry with or offended by our unreasonable God, until we realize that if He weren't unreasonable we would still be lost in our sins and captive to death. After all, it took an unreasonable God to become like us, die in our place, and bring us salvation.

Audio file of the sermon based on this reflection