A Day of Good News

Any Dad’s Army* fans here tonight? Yes? I certainly am! I won’t miss an episode if I can help it, however many times I’ve seen it before. But I imagine that anyone under the age of about 55, finds it hard to accept that that classic comedy series holds up a true mirror to the way things were in the early 1940s when this country was at war with Germany. Was there ever really a time in Britain when food was in such short supply that Lance-Corporal Jones, the butcher, would curry favour with Captain Mainwaring by slipping him a couple of pork chops before parade? Did wide-boys like Private Walker really run a black-market business in basic commodities like chocolate and nylons from inside their many-pocketed overcoats? Yes, they did. But things never, ever, got so bad in Walmington-on-Sea that Jonesy or Walker were able to sell pigeon droppings at five quid a quarter. But that’s how it was in the city of Samaria, the capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, in about 850 BC when the war between Israel and its northern neighbour, Syria, was at its height.

‘And there was a great famine in Samaria, as they [the Syrians] besieged it, until an ass’s head was sold for eighty shekels of silver, and the fourth part of a kab of dove’s dung for five shekels of silver.’ 2 Kings 6:25 (RSV). Part of our first lesson this evening.

Samaria was a fortified city set on a hill about 300 feet above the Plain of Esdraelon, and it was impregnable ... except by siege. And siege was the weapon the Syrians were using against it in the story we had read to us tonight. Led by their king, Ben-Hadad II, they had mobilised their entire army and surrounded the city. They had let no-one and no-thing in or out for weeks. And things were so bad that not only was pigeon dung selling for a fiver a tub, but people were resorting to cannibalism to stay alive.

In a bit of the story that wasn’t read to us, Jehoram, the Israelite king, is walking the city walls when a woman calls out to him. ‘Your majesty. Help me,’ she shouts. ‘How can I help you,’ he asks. ‘By making this neighbour of mine hand over her baby. We had a deal. We’d eat my baby yesterday and we’d eat hers today. Well, we had mine boiled yesterday as agreed, but now she’s hidden her baby so that I can’t get my hands on it.’

Things couldn’t get any worse for the people of Samaria. The besieging army had them by the throat. They were without food and water and their only prospect was death by one horrible means or another — starvation, or dehydration, or disease, or the sword. And soon. A desperate situation and one summed up by these two screeching women confronting their helpless monarch on the city walls.

But now, rather like in a film, the writer of the Second Book of Kings cuts from a close-up of the face of the distraught monarch to a different scene. We see four lepers sitting in the dust just outside the city gate. Emaciated bundles of rags, filthy, dishevelled, covered in ulcers and sores, they are (as they say) considering their future! Choose how they look at it, their prospects are not good. They can stay where they are and starve. Or they can go into the city and starve or be stoned. Or they can go to the enemy camp and be put to the sword. When Henry Ford invented the motor car, he told people they could have any colour they liked so long as it was black. It seemed to these four lepers that they were being offered any future they liked so long as it was death. But one of them was an optimist. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I take your point. We are pretty certain to die whatever we do. We’ll certainly die if we stay here. And we’ll certainly die if we go into the city. But, who knows, if we go to the Syrians, they might not put us to the sword.’

Now that was optimism! Even if they had been sweet-smelling, freshly-clothed, healthy young Israelites, the Syrians would have put them straight against the wall and used them for spear practise. But as contagiously diseased, stinking lepers that shed bits of body-parts every time they moved, they stood no chance of getting within sniffing distance of a Syrian soldier.

Anyway, they decided to risk it. So they waited till dusk to give themselves the best chance of getting down to the Syrian camp undetected, and then they set off. Can you imagine the scene. Here’s the new camera shot. We’re among the Syrian tents, at the edge of the camp, watching these four bags of bones shuffle out of the darkness and come to an uncertain halt as they see the first tent in front of them. We hear one of them whisper: ‘What do we do now?’ And another replies. ‘I don’t know. Give ourselves up I suppose.’ A third says: ‘To whom?’ And the fourth, still an optimist, says. ‘Maybe there’ll be someone friendly in this tent.’ So they lift the flap and peer in. There’s an oil lamp burning, but there’s no one there. There’s food ... bread, fruit, goat stew (still warm), wine, water ... and the lepers are into it like a shot, gulping it down, stuffing their mouths till their cheeks are bulging. If they’re going to die, they’re not going to die hungry or thirsty. But after a while, when they come up for air, they realise this is all very odd. There hasn’t been a sound from anyone but themselves since they arrived. One of them leaves the tent they’re in and creeps into the next. ‘That’s empty too,’ he tells the others. Getting bolder and bolder as they go, the four begin to work their way through the camp. There’s not a soul there. Soon, they are helping themselves to clothes, jewellery, cash, anything of value, and carting it off to a bit of a hiding place that they’ve found in some scrub just outside the camp. A place they can come back to later.

But then one of them stops in his tracks. ‘Oh no,’ he says. ‘Here’s a thought. Dawn can’t be that far off. And what’s going to happen when it comes? Someone up there on the battlements is going to realise that there’s no smoke from camp-fires, no noise, no movement. That for some reason all the Syrians have scarpered. And what’s going to happen then? They’re going to come down here, aren’t they? And who are they going to find? Little old us, wined, dined and up to our eyes in loot ... while they’ve been dropping like flies up in the city for lack of food and water. Friends, it is not going to go down at all well. This is a day of good news. I think we’d better get ourselves up there as fast as we can and announce it.’

So that’s what they did. At first, of course, they weren’t believed. And then they were believed but the king and his advisers decided it was a trap laid by the Syrians. But in the end, everyone realised there was no trap, and that all the lepers had said was true. And that the Lord had scared off the Syrians. And everything turned out OK, and they all lived happily ever after.

A great story. But is it more than that? I’m sure that it is. 2 Timothy 3: 16. Paul tells Timothy: ‘All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.’ All scripture, including this story from 2 Kings about the four lepers and the siege of Samaria. It will, if we let it, teach us, reprove us, correct us, and train us in righteousness. How? By showing us that we are in just the same position as the four lepers in that Syrian camp, and that the world outside the church is in just the same position as the besieged inhabitants of Samaria. By showing us that this is a day of good news, but by showing us too, perhaps, that we are less willing and less ready than those four lepers to share it with those who need to hear it. Yes?

How are we like the four lepers? We are like the four lepers in that we too have found life instead of death. Like them, we came in hunger and have found food in abundance. We came in despair and have found peace and joy. We came in poverty and have found great riches. Like them, we have eaten and been satisfied, we have drunk and been filled. Like them, deserving nothing and asking only mercy, we have received all we have needed, hoped for, desired.

All their bounty was found in the Syrian camp. All our is found in the Lord Jesus Christ. In his kingdom, in his church, in His Spirit, in his people, in his Word. And we, just like those lepers, celebrate our good fortune by enjoying to the full the bounty that we have discovered. We revel in the things of God. We spend all our time in the company of other lucky lepers like ourselves. We fill our ears with sacred music. We fill our time with sacred activities. And we forget, oh so easily, that the world up on the hilltop remains full of people who are still as we were before we got lucky, before we encountered the grace of God and became rich beyond all telling.

Were we once lost, despairing, and without hope? The folks who live on the hill still are? Were we once hungry, thirsty, and dissatisfied? The folks who live on the hill still are. Were we once besieged by enemies on every hand, at the mercy of the dark? The folks who live on the hill still are. Were we once dying? The folks who live on the hill still are.

But here, perhaps, is where we part company with the lepers, where we cease to be like them. For they came to their senses, faced up to their responsibility, recognised their self-centeredness, and actually went to the folks who lived on the hill. "This is a day of good news," they said. "Woe betide us if we remain silent."

Why do so many of us remain silent? Is it just cowardice? Fear of sounding foolish? Fear of being labelled ‘holy joes and judies’, religious nutters? On the surface, perhaps. But I think that there’s more to it than that. I think there are two deeper, underlying reasons for our remaining silent and they both urgently need to be recognised and dealt with.

The first is this. We ourselves know far less than we should of the goodness of God and the riches of his grace, and, in consequence, we feel we have very little to talk about to the folks who live on the hill. Because, truth to tell, we have not really explored the tents of the Syrians. We have peaked under one corner, found a half-empty can of sardines and decided that ‘that’s it folks ... that’s all that there is’. It’s not unpleasant and it keeps us from dying but, well, really, it’s not that exciting, is it? Oh, if that is how we feel, may God by the power of his Holy Spirit open our eyes and ears and hearts to the amazing riches of his grace. ‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.’

And the second reason we keep silent is this — closely related to the first. We think that the folk who live on the hill are, in truth, not really hungry, not really thirsty, not really despairing, not really dying at all. They laugh a lot, they make plenty of noise, they seem very satisfied, very altogether. What would they want with this half-tin of sardines I have to offer. Oh, if that’s what we believe, may God by the power of his Holy Spirit open our eyes and ears and hearts to the truth of the world’s wretchedness and hopelessness and despair. May he show us the unhappiness behind the laughter, the cries for help behind the noise, the dissatisfaction behind all the possessions and activity.

This is a day of good news. May God make it so good to each of us that we simply cannot keep silent about it. Amen.

* Dad’s Army was a comedy in 83 episodes shown on British television. It portrayed life during the Second World War in the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard lead by the wholly incompetent local bank manager, Captain Mainwaring.