I have no one
For the one who has waited so long for help that the waiting has become the shape of the days. A man lay by a pool in Jerusalem and told a stranger the plain truth, and the stranger had already walked over to hear it.
You know the arrangement. There is a place where help is given and you know exactly where it is. You may be lying within sight of it. The trouble is the gap between you and the help, which looks small to everyone else and has beaten you every time, because someone else is quicker, or someone else has a person to push them forward. You have learned the timing of the thing, and you have learned that knowing the timing changes nothing when you cannot move fast enough. After enough years the waiting stops being a stretch you are passing through and becomes the shape of your days.
For you it may be an illness and the long list of things that were meant to help, or a marriage that has been in trouble so long that the trouble has its own furniture, or a child who does not call. Whatever it is, you have asked, and you have been near the help, and the help has gone to someone else. Somewhere in those years you stopped telling anyone how long it has been, because people flinch when they hear the number.
There was a pool in Jerusalem, near the gate where the sheep were brought in. John says it had five covered walkways, and under them lay a crowd of the sick, the blind, the lame and the paralysed. The belief in that place was that the water would stir from time to time, and that the first one in after it stirred would be made well. So the walkways were full of people watching the surface of a pool, and the pool went to whoever was fastest, when speed was the one thing nobody in that crowd had.
One man there had been ill for thirty-eight years. John does not give his name or say what was wrong with him, only that he had been lying there a long time.
Jesus came to that pool during a feast. He saw this one man, and John says He knew the man had been lying there a long time, and then He asked him whether he wanted to be healed. The question can sound strange, asked of someone who has been ill for most of a lifetime. What matters here is the answer, because the man gives Him something truer than a yes.
Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is troubled, and while I am going another steps down before me.
John 5:7 RSVCE
It is his whole life in one sentence. I have no one. The thing that would help is right there, and every time I try, someone else gets there first. The man is telling a stranger exactly where the gap is rather than making an excuse, and after thirty-eight years he has stopped dressing it up.
The healing does not happen at the pool. Jesus does not carry him down to the water, or arrange for him to be first the next time it stirs, or say anything about the water at all. He tells the man to get up, pick up his mat and walk, and the man does. The help he had been watching for all those years turned out to be standing beside him, in a Person.
That is the part I keep returning to. The man never reached the thing he was waiting for. The One he was not waiting for walked over to where he lay.
He walked past the water to the one who could not reach it.
I do not want to make this neater than John made it. There was a crowd under those walkways and one man stood up. John does not tell us why him and not the others, and I will not pretend to. A letter cannot promise you that your thirty-eight years end this week. What it can tell you is what the story shows about where He goes: to the one who has no one, to hear an answer that was never a yes, and the length of the waiting does not put Him off.
So carry the man's sentence, and carry the version he actually said rather than a polite one. I have no one. Tell it to Him the way the man told it, as a plain account of where the gap is. You may not have prayed in years, or you may have prayed so long that the words have worn smooth. Say it as a report rather than a prayer, if prayer feels beyond you tonight. He has already come near enough to hear it.
There is a small thing in the story that I would not want you to miss. When the man stood up he did not know who had healed him, because Jesus had slipped away into the crowd. The man had been met and helped and he still could not have told you the name. Later Jesus found him again, in the temple, and only then did the man learn who it was. Being found by Him and knowing you have been found are often two different days. If you feel nothing tonight, it does not mean nothing has come near.
Jesus also gave the man his feet, which means he was not meant to stay on the mat being grateful. The man walked. He had said he had no one, and in the Gospel it was Jesus Himself who answered that, and in your life He very often answers it through a face. A friend who has never heard the long version. A priest. If the thirty-eight years are an illness of the body or the mind, then a doctor is one of the ways He comes, and the mat is the wrong place to wait for that kind of help. I have sat with people whose waiting had gone on so long that they had stopped counting, and the turn, when it came, often began with the sentence being said out loud to someone.
If you are the one who has no one, that sentence can be said to a person as well as to Him. It is the hardest sentence to say aloud, and in the story it is the one that was answered. And if the waiting has worn you down to the point where you have thought about not going on, please say that part out loud tonight too, to a friend who can pick up or to a helpline. The years have not made you less worth finding.
I do not know how long you have been lying within sight of help. He knows. He knew the man had been there a long time before He asked him anything. Then He came to the mat, and asked, and listened to an answer that was not a yes, and spoke. That is still the direction He walks.