The Abana and Pharpar Syndrome – 1 July 2016

We take an excursion into the Jewish scriptures in the lectionary for next Sunday.  It’s the memorable story of Naaman, powerful and proud captain of the army of Syria.  Naaman developed leprosy.  No one in Syria could help him, but his wife’s maid, an Israelite slave girl, said there was a prophet down in Israel who could heal these things.  You have to be a bit sorry for Naaman… on top of the humiliation of his leprosy, he is now commanded by the king to go to Israel, a captive and subject land, to consult this pestilential village prophet, all on the advice of a servant girl.  If you know the story, you know that Naaman’s humiliations are not over yet.

Elisha the prophet neglects even to come outside to greet Naaman, who has just rolled up with his chariots and horses.  Elisha sends a message:  Tell him to go and bathe in the Jordan seven times.  Naaman erupts.  The Jordan is a much inferior river to Syria’s clear mountain streams:  Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean? [II Kings 5:12]  Naaman has a noble tantrum.

Apparently there is (or was once) a syndrome recognised by physicians, called the Abana and Pharpar Syndrome.  It is when a patient rejects good medical advice because it conflicts with the patient’s own opinions or prejudices, or because the patient thinks it had been delivered in an inappropriate way – as when the doctor finally became fed up. 

The Abana and Pharpar Syndrome (APS) flourishes often enough in the Christian community.   I know it well.  Fundamentalism is many things, but typically it includes a state of mind in which a person rejects the message if it was not expressed in familiar terms, or if whoever is delivering the message is not approved of.  Familiar clichés such as, But I always thought that… or, My Bible says that…, may be symptoms of APS.  

Naaman was being offered a way forward, but in an inferior foreign land, by a disrespectful Hebrew prophet, in a humiliating process.  To be healed, therefore, he had to set ego aside and open himself to new possibilities.  Naaman was at a turning point in his life.  It is the point of realising that not everything we had assumed, is true; not everything we were told, was right; not everything we hoped, is going to happen; not all the walls and fences we built and admired, to protect ourselves, were actually necessary, or even helpful; not all the attitudes we inherited, were appropriate or accurate…  If this moment comes, it is what in Greek is called a καιρος (kairos), a time when something new from God is possible and imminent.  History bristles with examples – as when the President of South Africa, the Dutch Reformed Christian F W de Klerk, realised after generations of apartheid, that the suffrage must now be extended to all South Africans, and that Nelson Mandela could no longer be held in prison.  That is kairos on a grand scale…  On the level of our personal faith and life, there are certainly these moments, if we are open to embracing the new, and feeling the wind of the Spirit.  It may be as simple as choosing another path.  As Robert Frost expressed it:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.