Oedema and the water well

Here in Jersey – as elsewhere, actually – many folk suffer from various types of oedema – fluid retention of various kinds and varying degrees of seriousness. Oedema most often seems to arise in the legs – peripheral oedema – and it’s very unpleasant.

Chronic oedema is now extremely common in severely obese patients. And, of course, all patients with generalised oedema appear to be obese and have a high Body Mass index.

Two thousand years ago – at a dinner party one Sabbath day – one of the guests had oedema. See bold above. Things don’t change very much, do they? Dinner parties. Folk with water retention.

It was a Sabbath day dinner party. To heal on the Sabbath (rare as that would have been – then as now) was to work. And work on a Sabbath day was against the law. A criminal offence in Galilee.

Interestingly, Jesus asked the host and assembling guests for advice about this fluid-full man. “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?” Their answer never came. They were watching Jesus silently. They remained silent.

Jesus then did three things to the man: he took hold of him; he healed him; he sent him away. Maybe this is better expressed (the original Greek verbs allow it - epilambanomai; iaomai; apolyo): he hugged him; he cured him; he set him free. 

The host and guests remained silent. But not Jesus. He asks them their views about a parallel situation.

The parallel has to do with a well – a water well - into which has fallen a son – or an ox.

Yes, you noticed, a water well. A man has fallen down a water well. No doubt he’s so immersed in water that he’s full of water. So full that he will drown in that very thing that is absolutely essential to the life of all of us.

But did you notice the “son” and the “ox”? Why did Jesus use the two specific parallels. Could it be that the Jews at the Sabbath dinner party (at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, a Jewish political-religious party) were being reminded that a “son” would be “one of us” – a Jewish boy?

And an “ox”? One of “them”? One of the “not-God’s-chosen”, one of the defiled?

Either way, who would leave the obese, odema’d son or ox immersed in water, drowning in what he knew was essential to life but which had immersed him completely, and wait until the next day before fishing him out?

Richard Syvret’s physical peripheral oedema is heart-related. His real oedema necessitates the God-man at the top of the well.