2 Kings 2:17-25: a reflection

17When they urged him until he was ashamed, he said, “Send them.” Therefore they sent fifty men; and they searched for three days, but didn’t find him. 18They came back to him while he stayed at Jericho; and he said to them, “Didn’t I tell you, ‘Don’t go’?” 19The men of the city said to Elisha, “Behold, please, the situation of this city is pleasant, as my lord sees; but the water is bad, and the land is barren.” 20He said, “Bring me a new jar, and put salt in it.” Then they brought it to him. 21He went out to the spring of the waters, and threw salt into it, and said, “The LORD says, ‘I have healed these waters. There shall not be from there any more death or barren wasteland.’” 22So the waters were healed to this day, according to Elisha’s word which he spoke. 23He went up from there to Bethel. As he was going up by the way, some youths came out of the city and mocked him, and said to him, “Go up, you baldy! Go up, you baldy!” 24He looked behind him and saw them, and cursed them in the LORD’s name. Then two female bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of those youths. 25He went from there to Mount Carmel, and from there he returned to Samaria.

The people of Jericho come to Elisha with a problem: their city is well situated, but the water is bad and the land barren, bringing death and miscarriage rather than life. Elisha asks for a new bowl with salt, goes to the spring, throws the salt in, and speaks the LORD's word: I have healed this water; there shall no longer be death or barrenness from it. And the water was healed, the text says, to this day.

Notice what God does through his prophet: he heals a source that had been dealing out death and turns it into a source of life. The problem was at the spring, the origin, and that is where the healing goes, right to the source, so that what had brought death now brings life and fruitfulness. God does not just treat the symptoms downstream; he heals the poisoned spring.

There is hope in that image for the places in our own lives that have become sources of death rather than life, a poisoned relationship, a barren stretch, a source that keeps producing bitterness or loss. God is able to heal at the spring, to change what a thing produces by cleansing its source. (The chapter goes on to a hard, troubling scene of youths mocking the prophet and coming to harm, a sobering passage about contempt for the holy that the text does not gloss over.) But hold onto the healed water: God can take a source of death and make it a source of life. Bring him the poisoned spring, and ask him to heal it at the source.

Lord, you healed the poisoned spring at Jericho so it brought life instead of death. Where something in my life has become a source of death or barrenness, heal it at the source, cleanse the spring, and make it bring forth life and fruitfulness again.