Freak Show, only in the Gospel of Luke: the Beloved Physician’s Water-Face-Man

I’ve been thinking about miracles, and freak shows came to mind. When the freaky guy shows up, you take notice. Everyone knows of the existence of the freak:

• “Look! There he is! Don’t look! He’ll see you looking! But, look!” And then, whispering: “Let’s avoid him. Let’s go this way. Don’t look!” — furtively looking…

Lack of humanity by those “looking” is so common, so severe, that such “looks” occasion Federal ADA protection. Why? Because you can’t get a job except as a freak in a freak show. You live in poverty and obscurity, utterly alone, depressed, in crushing, heart-stopping despair, everyone being entirely condescending:

• “Oh, bless your little heart, you poor thing, such a pitiful imbecile. They let you out today? Where’s your carer? Let me call the nice men with those funny long arm straight jackets for you. They’ll take care of you at the funny farm. Aww, you’re so pitiful, there there now…”

Meanwhile, the “freak” might be a firefighter, a hero, who went into a burning building to rescue people and ended up getting his face severely burned, who had to undergo a dozen reconstructive surgeries of the scar tissue and grafts, who is still a firefighter, and has been enjoying BBQs with those he rescued right down the years. Who’s the one who’s disabled?

Someone took that picture at the top of this post here in North Carolina not that long ago. It still goes on. When I was about six years old, I would ride my little bicycle the two or three miles to the East Side of Saint Cloud, Minnesota, over the bridge spanning the Mississippi river to the Benton County Fair. There was a freak show on the south loop road of the fair grounds, you know, along with cotton candy concessionaires and Ferris Wheels and sledgehammer bell ringer challenges. On seeing the advertisement for a freak show like the one in the photo up top, I instantly felt a dark cloud come over me, stopping me dead in my tracks. I was instantly depressed. But I wanted to understand what this was all about. “They’re not really making fun of people, are they? You pay money to make fun of people?” I got my ticket, 10¢ in the mid-1960s if I remember correctly, and went in. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said of his torture in the gulags, it wasn’t the pain that scared him, it was the eyes of his torturer with no conscience behind them that frightened him.

A tall middle-aged guy came out with what looked like a massive cancerous tumor taking up the whole of one side of his face and head and chin. But that’s not what grabbed my attention so much as being overwhelmed by this guy obviously barely surviving in the darkest, deepest, heart-stopping pit of despair, ever. Then our eyes connected. It was a spiritual connection. It was like he was sorry that I was distraught at him having to sell his deformity. It was like a whole other universe opened up for me. The currents of suffering ran so deeply in this guy, as deep as the universe, so aware of the reality of the ever so fallen human condition, this guy being an utterly unknown treasure of the human race. Then he disappeared into the dark backstage, the darkest, deepest, heart-stopping pit of despair, ever. I stumbled outside, found my little bike, and slowly rode home, miles away, carrying these incalculably profound depths of the fallen universe with me. This was very formative for me, until this very day.

With that preface, let’s take a look at Luke 14:1-6 where we meet up with Jesus as He miraculously cures Water-Face-Man. Only Saint Luke, the Beloved Physician, who says in the introductory words of his Gospel that he has not only learned from eyewitnesses (using the word autopsy), but also that he himself has personally followed all events closely from the beginning… only dearest Luke recounts what happened to Water-Face-Man. The other Gospels say nothing.

In Luke’s account, Water-Face-Man never says a word and never appears again. I’m guessing that Luke himself hunted this guy down, hard to find because he was no longer Water-Face-Man. There’s zero chance that the Holy Spirit would have Water-Face-Man presented in the inspired Scriptures in this manner unless he also became a great saint in the early Church, so grateful to Jesus, so eager to serve the Son of the Living God, but shaken until the end of his days. The lawyers and Pharisees had purposely used him, capitalizing on his suffering, to find something by which they could accuse Jesus, such as healing, that is, working on the Sabbath.

• “And it happened that He [Jesus] went into the house of one of the leaders of the Pharisees on a Sabbath to eat bread and they were keeping close surveillance on Him. And… LOOK! A certain water-face-man [ = with “dropsy”] was there right in His Face. And answering [the situation], Jesus spoke to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying: ‘Is it lawful on the Sabbath to heal or not?’ But they kept silent. And tightly taking hold of him, He healed him, and sent him away. And to them He said, “Which of you with a donkey or an ox falling into a pit will not immediately pull it up on the day of the Sabbath?” And they were not able to make a response to these things.”

Some notes about this event:

• “Jesus went into the house of one of the leaders of the Pharisees on a Sabbath to eat bread…” — The Pharisees want to entrap Jesus by inviting not only him, but also Water-Face-Man, almost forcing Jesus to heal Water-Face-Man on the Sabbath. In their minds, that would be the sin of working on the Sabbath. Their malice is proven in two ways: (1) the use of the description “keeping close watch” or “surveillance”; (2) Jesus’ answer to the situation about the controversy of working on the Sabbath with zero intervening dialogue, not with Water-Face-Man, not with the lawyers and Pharisees. The tension is here is deadly. Jesus is not afraid.
• LOOK! Lol. This is exactly the reaction of everyone when the “freak show” appears on the street, in the supermarket, in the house of one of the leaders of the Pharisees… Look! Look! What a freak! Saint Luke isn’t afraid to mock the lawyers and Pharisees: It’s no surprise at all that the Freak Show is there. It’s a malicious set-up.
• A certain Water-Face-Man… in other words, not any Water-Face-Man, but this particular one, and, therefore, surely an individual whom Luke got to know later, someone everyone would later come to know…
• Water-Face-Man: ἄνθρωπός … ὑδρωπικὸς = man who has a watery face. Extremely pedantically, we have: (1) ὕδωρ = water; (2) ὤψ = eye, or, in usage, face; (3) ‎-ικός = a suffix that speaks to something pertaining to someone or something… And while received transliteration across the millennia gives us the word “dropsy”, a varying condition not ever of the face, but, say, of the stomach or legs, ankles, feet, such as one has with heart or hepatic or renal failure, I think we should instead use the non-anachronistic literal description, water-face. In this passage, this guy’s being in Jesus’ Face spoke the entire story. He didn’t have to explain his condition, didn’t have to lift his lengthy garments of the day to show Jesus his feet. It was obvious to all immediately what the problem was: his water-face. He doesn’t speak at all because maybe he can’t speak.
• Water-Face-Man just does what he was surely told to do by that leader of the Pharisees, namely, to stand in front of Jesus. That would be enough to provoke a healing, a work, on the Sabbath. The word for “in front of” Jesus, or getting in Jesus’ Face, as we say, is έμπροσθεν, a compound preposition from ἐν “in”, and πρός “unto” or “toward”, to which is added the locative adverbializing -θεν (πρόσθεν), all of which, altogether we might prosecute as being “in someone’s face.” It’s really quite intense.
• After Jesus interrogates the lawyers and Pharisees on their hypocrisy, Jesus tightly taking hold of this water-face freak show, heals him, and sends him on his way. ἐπιλαβόμενος = “tightly taking hold of…”, you know, like Jesus was squeezing water out of the this guy’s water-face.
• Jesus then asked about donkeys and oxen falling into deep pits, as to whether they, the lawyers and Pharisees, would haul them out on the Sabbath. That probably happened to some of them that very morning, like, immediately before this healing event. Could they not see that Water-Face-Man was in a pit of the darkest despair? That’s how they knew they could cynically use him for their purposes against Jesus. Also, Water-Face-Man likely had a nickname, like Donkey-Man or Ox-Man, because, when his face was watery, he looked like an ox or donkey. I have to wonder as to whether Jesus saw, some 30+ years earlier, a certain Donkey-Boy, Ox-Boy, Water-Face-Boy, taking care of the donkey and ox at the crib in Bethlehem, or was a Donkey-Ox-Water-Face-Boy one of the Shepherds who saw the angels and heard them singing and who hastened to the crib to LOOK! at his Creator and Redeemer, with his Creator and Redeemer looking at him, not with disgust for his Water-Face, but with self-sacrificial love? Surely, this would be the only employment Donkey-Boy, Ox-Boy, Water-Face-Boy could possibly have. Presenting himself as Water-Face-Boy was the only gift Donkey-Boy, Ox-Boy could give to Jesus in all humility and trust. He just stood there, saying nothing, but… Pah-rum-pah-pum-pum… … pumm… pumm… pumm… Mere eisegesis?

Not very long afterward, Jesus Himself would be the freaky-boy, all swollen in His Face:

Jesus stands in our place, Innocent for the guilty. He will Himself become the crucified donkey, with the donkey being the forever symbol for the Hebrews:

Now, this Water-Face-Man, I think, is a saint (though not officially canonized). I note that he was asking, albeit just by being in Jesus’ Face, asking for a miracle for himself. And he got the miracle. That’s encouraging. And he would be thankful. You can ask for miracles, even for yourself, and you won’t be despised by Jesus for doing so. He told us to ask for good things, that our Heavenly Father knows how to give us even the Holy Spirit.

My guess as to Water-Face-Man’s malady of being watery faced is that it is a rare condition, but very notable if a sufferer braves the asinine ox-s#it comments of others about himself looking like an ass or an ox because of his watery face and goes outside in view of others while in that state. That watery-face condition is episodic (approximately four days) for those who suffer from this super-rare Type 1 hereditary bradykinin mediated, not histamine induced nor otherwise “acquired” but, to repeat, certainly out of control production of bradykinin, which itself creates out of control inflammation by way of vasodilation.

Sufferers are desperately in need of more C1 Esterase Inhibitor. Not having that C1 Esterase Inhibitor, about one third of sufferers die from this inflammation should it invade the throat, suffocating them. When it’s in the throat, they cannot speak, and are about to die. This is surely the malady and mortal state of affairs for our non-speaking Water-Face-Man. The lawyers and Pharisees are so very heartless in using this guy – unbeknownst to him- to endanger Jesus.

Here are some pictures of this malady so you get the idea how freak-show-esque it is. It can attack in the stomach and hands and feet, anywhere, but you notice it in the face, the watery-face. Here’s just one lip during an “attack” as it is called:

Here’s face and hands:

Here’s the stomach and intestines:

Here’s some laryngeal swelling, with which you can’t talk and with which you’ll likely suffocate as that last bit of airway can close off in just another minute or two:

Here’s more of the face because, like, we’re talking about Water-Face-Man:

So, now you understand why he’s called Water-Face-Man, right?

I like how he just plants himself right in front of Jesus, in His Face, which, in itself, is the request for the miracle of healing. It is also his gift to Jesus of humility and trust. That’s all he has to give in life, because, he’s the freak show, right? Not the lawyers and Pharisees, but he’s the freak show. Really? Hah… Pah-rum-pah-pum-pum… … pumm… pumm… pumm…

Sorry, I can’t help it:

I am Water-Face-Man, but without the humility, without the trust. I’ve so tried to hide myself my whole life. I can’t stand condescension. Grr.

I suppose I should write a post on my experiences.

I suppose I should write a prayer for the intercession of Luke’s Water-Face-Man.

And I should learn how to play the drum…