Harvest Assembly - the lepers at the gate - sharing - KS 1

Harvest assembly 09

The lepers at the gate - 2 Kings 7

There were once four men who were very ill. They had caught a disease which no one could cure, and no one wanted to go near them in case they caught it too. They had lived in a city with high walls around it, but now everyone told them they couldn’t live there anymore. They would have to live outside the city walls. They didn’t have a house to live in. They didn’t have food to eat. All they could do was shout out to people as they went in and out of the city gates to ask them to give them food.

Life was very hard. Then it got even harder. Another king from another country declared war against the city. He sent his army – thousands of soldiers with their horses and chariots. They camped all around the city and stopped people going in and out. No one could bring food in anymore. The shops in the city got emptier and emptier. No one had anything in their cupboards anymore. Everyone was hungry.

The four men outside the city couldn’t beg for food any more – no one had any to give them. One night they said to each other, “Why should we stay here? If we go and give ourselves up to the enemy they might help us. If they don’t we aren’t any worse off than we are here – there’s no food here anyway, and no one wanted to help us before anyway!” So in the morning, just as the sun was rising they headed towards the enemy camp.

What they didn’t know was that in the night a strange thing had happened. All the enemy soldiers had woken up, because they heard a strange sound. It was a sound like a great army coming to attack them. The story in the Bible says that God made them hear the sound, but they didn’t know that. They were very frightened, and without stopping to pack anything up they all just ran away.

So when the four men got to the camp, there was no one there. They went into the first tent. There was food on the table – lots of food. They ate the food and went onto the next tent – more food – more than they could eat, so they gathered up the food for later.

Then one of them said – “wait a minute, this isn’t right. While we are eating and eating, the people in the city are starving. We should share this food with them, not eat it ourselves”. They thought about it – the people in the city hadn’t been very kind to them. They had made them live outside and not helped them. But they couldn’t just forget about them.

So they picked up as much food as they could carry and they headed back to the city. “Look,” they shouted to the guards. “The enemy camp is empty and it is full of food – enough for everyone.” Sure enough when the people in the city went to look, there was a feast to share, and the enemy army never came back again.

Sometimes it is easy to help our friends, but it is harder to share with people who we think have been mean to us. At harvest time we remember that we should share what we have with everyone who needs it, not just with people we especially like.