Biographical Gleanings

4 Pentecost, C p 9, July 6, 2025
2 Kings 5:1-14  Psalm 30
Gal. 6:1-18 Luke 10:1-12,16-20 

Lectionary Link

The Bible is highly biographical because it includes writing about people in the biographical modes of presentation which were used purposely by writers of the many different historical contexts represented by the biblical texts.

Biographies are not written for the people who lived in the time of the people about whom things are written; they are written for people later to serve as exemplars for the people at the time when the writing occurs and retained for future edification of future readers.

Biographical fragments are chosen and woven together in writing as a communicative events to persuade about important community values as understood by the writer making reference to the past and perhaps founding and heroic exemplars of the propagated community understandings and values.

At a certain time, writing about the prophet Elisha became instructive for fostering certain understandings and even correcting misunderstandings about God.

It is easy for us or any community to become so ethnocentric as to assume that God mainly works for our benefit and does wonderful things for us and not for others, and certainly not for our foreign enemies.

The story of Naaman is a story about a foreigner who was sick and in need of healing.  He heard about the source of a possible cure but it required him to seek health from a holy man in a different land.  He had to humble himself to go across the border and seek healing rites on the terms of the prophet Elisha.  That this story is even being recounted in the Jewish Bible is an indication to their readership that they should not limit the healing power of God to just their own people.  They needed to be reminded that the God of Israel was the God accessible to all.  And this is something which the prophets often felt their readership needed to be reminded of.  The Temple was a house of prayer for all people.  The message of the prophets of Israel was a message to everyone, including the people in Nineveh and Jonah had to be reminded of this after he ran away from the mission God sent him on to save the people of Nineveh.  Any valid definition of God as the one about whom none greater can be conceived, has to be preached as one whose saving benefits are available to all, including people who are not our favored acquaintances.  The healing of the foreigner Naaman by Elisha is like people from around the world coming for the diagnostic excellence of the Mayo Clinic.  Health is a universal need; God's health or salvation is available to everyone, and we misrepresent God if we don't promote this universal health concern of God.

Paul did not write an auto-biography but knowledge of his life and teaching come to us in his preserved and collected letters.  Paul was a Jew and as a male he was physically marked as one through the rite of circumcision.  But Paul also knew that he had another experience of being in Christ, and being in Christ gave him the ability to transcend his ritual identity as a Jew.  He came to understand that any person could know themselves to be in Christ, and transcend lesser ethnic, religious, ritual, socio-economic, or ever gender identities.  He preached a message of knowing oneself to be a "new creation."  Paul's biography included a confession of being a new creation because of his experience of the Risen Christ.  Paul's letter are a testimony to the possibility of being in Christ and being a new creation, that is, to experience a new personal identity through transforming spiritual experience.

The Gospels are varieties of biographies following the forms used by writers in the Greek language decades after Jesus and Paul.  They presented biographical information about Jesus and his recommended strategies.  Everyone in the first century knew about the kingdom of the Caesar.  Lots of people knew about the former kingdom of Israel.  They knew that the kingdom of Israel was no longer a land controlled and inhabited by and for the Jews.  Was Jesus understood to be a fire brand political figure to restore land again to a kingdom of and in Israel?  No, Jesus understood a more embracing kingdom, the great kingdom of God which encompassed the entire cosmos.  But people were alienated from this embracing notion of the kingdom of God.  They could obviously accept the realm and kingdom of the Caesar because the signs of it were everywhere.

Jesus preached the need for the awareness of the greater and more embracing kingdom of God.  It could be perceived inwardly by virtue of the Trojan Horse of God's image being stamped upon everyone.  But people lived in blindness until the awareness of the kingdom was activated through the knowledge of knowing the divine image stamp upon their lives.

Jesus was presented as commissioning the evangelical mission so that messengers could let as many as possible know that God is accessible to them and in knowing this they could be freed from lesser enslaving powers and they could know peace, the interior peace of having the image of God come to ascendency in their own self understanding.  They could know that their names were written in heaven because the citizenship of the kingdom of God was the awareness of the eternal God within them.

The appointed Gospel for today presents the concern of Jesus to get the news of the Kingdom of God out to as many as possible.  In practical ways, the evangelists were instructed not to force the message, to offer the message where it could be peacefully received.  Jesus also told the evangelist not to get hung up on the success of the mission or even the sense of authority which came from seeing evil defeated, because the message effect upon the evangelist's life is its own reward.

The Gospel for us is the reward of knowing that we are in Christ, we are a new creation, and we are enlightened to know that we live and move and have our being in God as our primary kingdom, even as we learn to merge in our lifestyles our local realms with the greater realm of the kingdom of God.

Let us learn from these biographical gleanings of Elisha, Paul, and Jesus.  The saving health of God belongs to everyone.  In Christ we are new creations living from more profound Christly identity than the limited local identities of family, country, land, gender, or socio-economical status.  Finally, we are blessed if we accept the knowledge that the kingdom of God has come so near as to be the activation of the image of God on our lives as our primary identity.  Amen.