The Question That Ruins Your Excuse
He'd been lying by the pool for 38 years. Then Jesus walked up and asked the one question nobody dared to: 'Do you want to get well?' The answer should have been obvious. It wasn't.
Part 2: The Question That Ruins Your Excuse
Thirty-eight years.
Not thirty-eight days. Not thirty-eight months. Thirty-eight years.
That’s how long a man had been lying beside a pool in Jerusalem, waiting for a miracle that never came — until a stranger walked up and asked him the most dangerous question anyone had ever asked him.
And if you’re honest, it might be the most dangerous question anyone has ever asked you.
The Pool Nobody Wanted to Visit
The Pool of Bethesda sat near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem — the entrance through which sacrificial animals were led into the temple. The irony is thick: right next to the place where offerings were brought to God, a crowd of broken people lay rotting in the open air.
In these lay a great multitude of those who were sick, blind, lame, or paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water;
This wasn’t a hospital. There were no doctors, no treatments, no intake forms. It was a holding pen for the hopeless — a collection of people the religious system had no category for.
The tradition was that an angel would occasionally stir the water, and the first person into the pool would be healed. Whether that was superstition or something else, the text doesn’t say. What it does say is that a crowd of desperate people had arranged their entire lives around a maybe.
Think about that. Blind people who couldn’t see the water move. Paralyzed people who couldn’t reach the water in time. All of them, day after day, lying on stone porches beside a pool that promised healing to whichever broken person was somehow the fastest.
It was hope designed to mock the hopeless.
And in the middle of that crowd — indistinguishable from the rest, probably long past the point where anyone noticed him — was a man who had been there for almost four decades.
When Suffering Becomes Your Address
John doesn’t tell us his name. He doesn’t tell us his diagnosis. He doesn’t explain how a man survives thirty-eight years beside a pool without a home, a job, or apparently anyone who cares enough to carry him three feet into the water.
He gives us one detail: thirty-eight years.
That number is doing something. Thirty-eight years isn’t a setback — it’s a biography. Whatever this man’s condition was, he didn’t just have it. He had become it.
There’s a difference between having a problem and becoming one with it. Between carrying pain and building your life around it.
After thirty-eight years, this man’s suffering wasn’t just something that had happened to him. It was his routine, his social circle, his explanation for everything. It was the story he told himself about who he was and why his life looked the way it did.
He wasn’t lying beside the pool anymore.
He was living there.
The Eyes That Pick You Out of a Crowd
Then Jesus shows up.
John’s Gospel is surgical about this moment:
When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he had been sick for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to be made well?”
Stop and picture this.
The pool was crowded. Bodies everywhere — blind, lame, paralyzed. A mass of need. And Jesus walks in and goes to one man. Not the youngest. Not the most dramatic. Not the one crying out the loudest.
The one who had been there the longest.
The one everyone else had stopped seeing.
This is Part 2 of El Roi in action. In Part 1, God found Hagar in a desert. Here, Jesus finds an unnamed man in a crowd. Both times, God doesn’t wait for an invitation. He picks you out.
But here’s where this story diverges from Hagar’s — and where it starts to get uncomfortable.
Because Jesus doesn’t say, “I see you” the way He did with Hagar through the angel. He doesn’t offer comfort first. He doesn’t affirm the man’s suffering or validate his experience.
He asks a question.
And the question is brutal.
”Do You Want to Get Well?”
Read it again: “Do you want to get well?”
On the surface, it sounds absurd. Even offensive. Of course he wants to get well. He’s been here for thirty-eight years. He’s paralyzed. He’s miserable. What kind of question is that?
But Jesus doesn’t ask stupid questions.
He asks revealing ones.
This question isn’t about the man’s medical condition. It’s about his will. His identity. His relationship with his own brokenness.
Because after thirty-eight years, “Do you want to get well?” is not an obvious yes.
Getting well would mean:
- He’d have to get up. Actually stand, walk, re-enter a world that moved on without him.
- He’d need to find work. No more sympathy, no more charity, no more exemption from responsibility.
- He’d lose his explanation. The reason everything was the way it was — gone.
- He’d have to figure out who he was without the mat, the pool, and the identity of “the sick man.”
Healing sounds like freedom until you realize it also means the death of every excuse you’ve been living inside.
Some of us have been lying beside our own pools for a long time. And if Jesus walked up today and asked, “Do you want to get well?” — we might hesitate longer than we’d like to admit.
The Answer He Didn’t Give
Watch what the man says:
The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, but while I’m coming, another steps down before me.”
Jesus asked: Do you want to get well?
The man answered: Let me explain why I can’t.
He didn’t say yes. He didn’t say no. He narrated his limitations. He offered a thirty-eight-year-old excuse wrapped in helplessness and presented it as an answer.
I have no one to help me. Someone else always gets there first. The system is broken and I’m stuck.
Sound familiar?
We do this all the time. God asks us a direct question about our will — Do you want this to change? — and we answer with our circumstances.
“I would, but my family…” “I can’t because my job…” “You don’t understand, I’ve tried…” “Nobody has ever helped me…”
And all of those things might be true. The man at Bethesda wasn’t lying. He really didn’t have anyone. The water really was an unfair system. His obstacles were real.
But Jesus didn’t ask about his obstacles.
He asked about his want.
There’s a difference between “I can’t” and “I don’t want to.” But there’s also a space in between — a dim, complicated, honest place where the answer is: I’m not sure I know how to want something I stopped believing was possible.
And that’s where most of us actually live.
Jesus Doesn’t Use the Pool
Here’s the part that should wreck every self-help gospel and every formula-based faith:
Jesus said to him, “Arise, take up your mat, and walk.” Immediately, the man was made well, and took up his mat and walked. Now that day was a Sabbath.
Jesus doesn’t help the man into the pool.
He doesn’t fix the system. He doesn’t say, “Let me carry you to the water next time it stirs.” He doesn’t improve the man’s chances within the broken framework the man had organized his whole life around.
He bypasses the pool entirely.
The thing the man had been staring at for thirty-eight years — the mechanism he believed was his only hope — Jesus ignored it completely.
Because the pool was never the answer. Jesus was the answer. And the pool had become the distraction — the thing that kept the man focused on a system instead of a Savior.
How many of us are lying beside our own pools?
The pool of “once I get that promotion.” The pool of “once my spouse changes.” The pool of “once I move to a new city.” The pool of “once I find the right church.” The pool of “once my depression lifts.”
We keep waiting for the water to stir. And Jesus is standing right next to us saying: Get up. You don’t need the pool. You need Me.
The Uncomfortable Part Nobody Preaches
The story doesn’t end with the healing. And the next part is the reason most sermons on Bethesda stop too early.
The man gets up, picks up his mat, and walks into Jerusalem — on the Sabbath. The religious leaders confront him immediately: Who told you to carry your mat on the Sabbath?
And look at his response:
But he who was healed didn’t know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, a crowd being in the place.
Thirty-eight years of paralysis. Instantaneous healing. And the man doesn’t even know who healed him.
He didn’t ask Jesus’ name. He didn’t fall at His feet. He didn’t say thank you. He just… walked away with his mat.
Later, Jesus finds him in the temple and says something chilling:
Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “Behold, you are made well. Sin no more, so that nothing worse happens to you.”
This isn’t a threat. It’s a warning. Jesus is saying: You’ve been set free. Don’t go build a new mat to lie on.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: some people get delivered from one prison and immediately start constructing another. The pool was gone, but the posture — the passivity, the excuse-making, the waiting for someone else to fix it — could follow him anywhere.
Freedom isn’t just a moment of healing. It’s a daily decision to stay up.
And then the man does something genuinely baffling:
The man went away, and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.
He reports Jesus to the people who are angry about the Sabbath violation. Whether this is innocent naivety or something darker, the text lets you wrestle with it. But at minimum, it’s a man who received the most extraordinary gift imaginable and immediately used it as currency with the powerful.
Old habits. Old postures. New legs, same instincts.
The Mat You’re Still Carrying
Jesus told him to pick up his mat.
That detail matters more than you think. The mat was the symbol of his illness. It was where he’d lain for thirty-eight years. And Jesus didn’t say “leave it” — He said pick it up and carry it.
Why?
Because the mat was supposed to go from being his bed to being his testimony. The thing he used to lie on was now the thing he walked with — proof of where he’d been, carried by the person he’d become.
But you have to actually walk for that to work.
Some of us have been healed of things — forgiven of things, delivered from things — and we’re still lying on the mat. Not because we can’t walk. Because walking means we’ve run out of reasons not to.
What El Roi Looks Like When It Hurts
In Part 1, being seen by God felt like comfort. Hagar, alone in the desert, received the tender gaze of El Roi — the God who sees — and it saved her.
But being seen by God isn’t always tender.
Sometimes being seen means God looks at the thing you’ve been hiding behind and says: I see you. Not the excuse. Not the story you tell. Not the thirty-eight years. You.
And I’m asking you a question you’ve been avoiding.
Do you want to get well?
That’s not cruelty. It’s the deepest kind of love — the kind that refuses to let you stay on the mat just because it’s familiar. The kind that would rather make you uncomfortable than leave you paralyzed.
El Roi doesn’t just see your pain. He sees your potential. And sometimes the most loving thing He can do is ask you the question that ruins your excuse.
Reflect
Don’t skim this. Sit with it.
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What is your “pool of Bethesda”? What system, circumstance, or waiting game have you organized your hope around — that might be keeping you from looking directly at Jesus?
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If Jesus asked you today, “Do you want to get well?” — what would your honest answer be? Not the Sunday school answer. The real one. Is there any part of your brokenness you’ve grown comfortable with?
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What excuse are you giving instead of an answer? The man at Bethesda narrated his obstacles instead of naming his desire. What’s your version of “I have no one to help me”?
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Is there a mat you need to pick up and carry — a testimony of where you’ve been — instead of a bed you’re still lying on?
A Prayer
Jesus, I’m not sure I like this question. But I think that means I need it.
I’ve been lying beside my own pool for a long time. Telling myself it’s because of my circumstances, my past, my limitations, my lack of help. And some of that is true. But some of it has become an excuse — and I think You’re calling that out right now.
I want to want to get well. Even the parts of me that are scared of what “well” looks like — the responsibility, the identity shift, the loss of the familiar — I give those to You.
Get me up. Not into the pool. Past it. I don’t need the water. I need You.
And the mat I’ve been lying on? Help me carry it as a testimony instead of crawling back to it when things get hard.
In Your name, Amen.
Coming Next
The man at Bethesda was visible — lying in public, surrounded by people — but utterly unseen until Jesus walked into his peripheral vision and asked the question that changed everything.
But what about the person who is seen by everyone… and still feels invisible?
In Part 3, we meet a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years. She’d spent everything she had on doctors. She was ritually unclean — untouchable by law. So she did the only thing she could think of: she pushed through a crushing crowd and grabbed the edge of a stranger’s robe.
And Jesus stopped.
In a sea of people pressing against Him from every direction, He felt one touch — and refused to move until she came forward.