There’s a very physical, down-to-earth tone about our readings today. Naaman has to travel, has to bathe in river water, to get his promised healing. And not just any river, this river, in this land, to be healed by this God. Naaman is so impressed that in the verses following he carts back two donkey loads of this earth so he can have somewhere special to pray. His own corner of a foreign land.
The story is about locality. About the special-ness of places and times. About rituals and ways of doing things. And about easy answers to hard questions.
The moral of Naaman’s story—and Jesus’s too—is that we should take God where find her, enjoy God where he finds us. And not go looking for God in all the wrong places—or worse turn down the God we do meet because somehow the encounter has been too easy. There’s a streak in us that likes our religion tough and our God to play hard to get. But the God we get today is easy, here with us, under our noses.