Naaman Washed Seven Times in the Jordan and the Washing of Rebirth
Old Testament: 4 Kings 5:10, 14
And Eliseus sent a messenger to him, saying: Go, and wash seven times in the Jordan, and thy flesh shall recover health, and thou shalt be clean. ... Then he went down, and washed in the Jordan seven times: according to the word of the man of God, and his flesh was restored, like the flesh of a little child, and he was made clean.
New Testament: Luke 4:27; John 3:5
And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet: and none of them was cleansed but Naaman the Syrian. ... Jesus answered: Amen, amen I say to thee, unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.
The connection
A Syrian general, a Gentile and a leper, is told by Eliseus to wash seven times in the Jordan. Naaman goes away angry, sure that the rivers of Damascus are better than any water in Israel, and only when his servants reason with him does he go down and do it; his flesh comes back like the flesh of a little child, and he is clean. Christ names him in the synagogue at Nazareth as the one leper of that age who was cleansed, and he a foreigner. The Church has read in him the one coming to be baptised: the cure is not in the quality of the water but in the word that commands it, and the one who goes down into it comes up with the flesh of a child, born again of water and the Holy Ghost.
Moral sense
Pride wanted a greater river and a more impressive remedy; the cure came by obedience to a plain command. Humility before the ordinary means God appoints is the way into healing.
Anagogical sense
Flesh restored like a little child's looks past the font to the resurrection, when the body itself is made new.
The Fathers
St Ambrose, On the Mysteries, 17-18: "And being immediately cleansed, he understood that it is not of the waters but of grace that a man is cleansed." He reads the captive maid who sent Naaman to the prophet as "the congregation gathered out of the Gentiles, that is, the Church of God", and turns at once to the newly baptised: "he indeed doubted before he was healed; you are already healed, and therefore ought not to doubt." Tertullian, Against Marcion IV.9, earlier than Ambrose, reads the Syrian's cleansing as the cleansing of the nations "in Christ their light" from "the seven deadly sins: idolatry, blasphemy, murder, adultery, fornication, false-witness, and fraud. Seven times, therefore, as if once for each, did he wash in Jordan", and in it "the virtue and fulness of the one baptism was thus solemnly imputed to Christ."
Warrant
Christ names Naaman (Luke 4:27), but as the foreigner to whom the cleansing went, not as a figure of Baptism; the baptismal reading is Ambrose's, so the badge is patristic. Checked in the Greek and the Hebrew: the Septuagint says Naaman ebaptisato, baptised himself, in the Jordan (4 Kings 5:14), where the prophet's command at 5:10 had used louo, wash. The Hebrew draws the same line, rachats in the command and tabal, dipped, in the doing. The cleansing is katharizo in both Testaments, and Luke's ekatharisthe is the very form the Septuagint uses of him.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1215.
