In our readings this week there is a strong thread of how God uses all sorts of people, and often particularly those who are the unlikely, the apparently disempowered or in some way not recognised or not accepted, to spread his promise and hope, and to encourage faith.

In our passage from 2 Kings 5, we see a slave-girl and servants playing key roles in helping the (self-important) Syrian captain Naaman to receive a cure for his leprosy; first, pointing him towards help and then supporting him in accepting the help offered. Once cured, Naaman went to Elisha and, surrounded by all his company, declared “‘Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel (v15) Through captives and subordinates, a leader came to believe – and perhaps through him then his soldiers who witnessed this came in turn to believe.

In the gospel passage from Luke 17, it is only the Samaritan leper, the foreigner and enemy, who comes back to Jesus to give thanks for being cured, Jesus sent him off: “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”  We don’t learn of what happened next but I’m sure that the cured leper told his story many times and through that, the story of Jesus would have spread.

When Paul was composing his second letter to Timothy, he was in prison, quite literally in chains – and yet this did not stop him from telling the gospel to his captors and writing encouragement to those growing in faith and ministry.  The ministry of those within prisons, whether offered by chaplains to prisoners, or of prisoners sharing kindnesses and God’s love with fellow inmates or with their warders, is a witness that continues around the world and on our doorstep today.

God’s love may be communicated out of the most unlikely or constrained situations, by perhaps the least noticed or respected voices.  Whatever barriers we put up, as did Naathan in his pride, and the King of Israel jumping to conclusions about why his enemy, the King of Aram, was referring Naathan to him, or perhaps the doubts we encounter in the suffocating weight of secular lack of interest or bureaucratic restrictions, God’s word is not chained: it finds a way.

There are so many ways we may be imprisoned that go beyond the literal deprivation of liberty: by deeply limiting health conditions, by grief, anxiety, loneliness, doubt … And yet, in the hospital waiting room, in the encounters of fellow sufferers or kindly friends, or even in the empty times when God waits patiently for us to find our way back to him, his word is not chained: it finds a way.

I remember reading a letter by a priest who had conducted yet another funeral where either those present had no sense of faith or were barely present at all.  He was asking himself what was the point.  And the point was, that in the very act of handing over the deceased into God’s loving care, this was a declaration of hope. He had no way of knowing how it might affect those who heard it – the most unlikely ears – but that was not his concern. That, as C.S.Lewis would put it, was a part of the story of each audience member.  God knows what seeds are set.

God can use each one of us, however unlikely we might be – or feel –  and however limited we might be, in spreading his news.  God’s word is not chained! That’s a wonderful thing to know.

Lucy G

Image by Lucy G