There's
a lot of action packed into a very little bit of reading today:
Naaman's healing, Elisha's refusal of payment, Gehazi's acceptance of
payment, the payment Gehazi then makes for his greed, an ax head
floating to avoid re-payment to the lender of said ax,
one man's eyes opened, the eyes of an entire army shut, a
massive game of blind-man's-bluff, cannibalism, and a cliff-hanger
ending! (Whew!)
As
I was reading through the action this odd little passage caught my eye, “For
your servant will no longer offer burnt offering nor will he
sacrifice to other gods, but to the Lord. In this matter may the Lord
pardon your servant: when my master goes into the house of Rimmon to
worship there, and he leans on my hand and I bow myself in the house
of Rimmon, when I bow myself in the house of Rimmon, the Lord pardon
your servant in this matter.” (5:17-8)
As
a modern Christian, my first thought is that Naaman's concern about
bowing down is merely the superstition of the poor ignorant peoples
of the past. Surely, as long as he doesn't really mean it in his
heart and mind, the bowing
of his
body is irrelevant. Right?
After all I can pray and worship just fine in any physical position.
I can pray standing on my hands (or could if I was capable of
standing on my hands for any longer than half a second), I can
worship laying flat on my back in a hammock sipping a … uh …
beverage. I mean, this is like Christianity for Beginners 101. You
can pray and worship God any time, anywhere, while doing anything.
Verily,
Naaman
can just direct his heart to the One True God while accompanying his
king into the false god's temple. No biggie.
However,
a
superficial check through Strong's Concordance
shows that in the Old Testament, the word predominantly translated as
“worship” is shachah,
the
literal meaning of which is to bow down or prostrate oneself. Hmm...
that's a physical action.
The same pattern holds in the New Testament. The word most often
translated as “worship” is the Greek word proskuneo
which again has the literal meaning of prostrating oneself.
Well,
now my head-wheels are turning. Perhaps
there is a more intimate connection between the body and soul than I
first thought. I'm
reminded of a passage from C. S. Lewis's Screwtape
Letters.
In this book Lewis chronicles the advice given by a fictitious demon
supervisor to a fictitious demon underling. Good and evil are
flip-flopped in the book since it is written from the demon's point of
view, and Lewis uses this inverted view as
an analytical tool through which to gaze at humanity.
From the 4th
letter:
One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray ‘with moving lips and bended knees’ but merely ‘composed his spirit to love’ and indulged ‘a sense of supplication’. That is exactly the sort of prayer we want; and since it bears a superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practised by those who are very far advanced in the Enemy’s service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite a long time. At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls. (emphasis mine)
I
know this is an area that I constantly fail in: to
recognize that to love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and
strength
(Mark 12:30)
includes my physical body as well, and my worship, my prayer should
not neglect the physical aspects of these actions.
This
is not to say that prayer and worship can only be done while kneeling
or bowing down, but if your tendency, like mine, is to hardly ever
engage with this physical aspect of worship, then you might be
missing something.
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