Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
When you study your way through the Gospel of John, pause a moment with the impotent man of Bethesda, healed after 38 years of despair. He was lying beside what we today would call a swimming pool where sick people would gather, because it was the common superstition that people could be healed one by one if each could jump in the water first when it gurgled mysteriously. An angel supposedly came at these intervals, to heal the lucky person who shoved and elbowed his way first into the pool. Crazy, but it was this poor man's only hope. (God would not have put the story in the Bible unless it is good for us to think about this man and put ourselves in his place for a bit.)
He had seen people healed, or at least had heard by gossip that some were. When your only hope is as slender as a spider's web, you hang on. We note that he is friendless. "I have no one to help me!" he wails (John 5:7). Happy, expectant people mill all around him daily, nobody bothers to notice him, everybody is too busy to stop and talk with him. He can't make any friends. On top of his paralysis, he has loneliness to carry. If he had a wife or children or relatives, they have given up on him and live their lives as though he is already buried.
Then the Friend of lonely people stops by to chat. Apparently the paralyzed man is the only one there ready to listen to what He might say. (Could He too have been lonely? The One "despised and rejected of men" is often lonely in big crowds of people.) The two struck up a conversation, and Jesus did what He wants us to do--He put Himself in the man's place. He felt for him, just wanted to relieve his distress, to bless him. We call it compassion.
The man didn't even know how to ask to be healed; but he did respond to the Stranger's question with a lament about loneliness. "Sir, I have no friend ..." He didn't curse his lot in life, or blame others. He responded to Jesus with simple, courteous conversation. Probably some tears in his eyes. That was all he could do: be courteous to this kind Friend. (If you're going to die in the next five minutes, at least you can be courteous and respectful to people!)
It was his salvation! He put himself in the arms of his new-found Friend and Savior. Come now, you do the same.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: February 8, 2004.
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