At what point should we give up on God healing us?

It seems like a silly question for a believer, who would be quick to respond, “Never!”  We are not ones to deny God’s role as Healer, and when we encounter someone in long-suffering, we encourage them to not give up on God.

However, when we are the ones long-suffering, our “Never!” can easily shift into, “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1)  As weeks, months, and years pass — as we watch opportunities for restoration fall apart — we can begin to accept a reality where healing just isn’t going to happen.

“Maybe God is a Healer, but I’ve fallen through the cracks.”

I imagine this was the mindset of the man in John 5, who for 38 years had been disabled by illness or injury.  38 years… that’s longer than some of you have been alive, and for others it’s the majority of your life.  We do not know the exact nature of his disability, but we know a few things:

• Life with the disability was not an option for him; whether because of pain, limitation, or longings, he would rather seek healing than figure out how to make it work.
• His handicap severely limited his ability to do simple things, like get into a pool quickly, despite innumerable attempts.
• No one — no family, friends, or kind strangers — were present or willing to help him; he was essentially alone in his suffering.

Then one day, a stranger approaches him and asks a peculiar question: “Do you want to get well?”

What kind of a question was that to ask a man who is functionally living by a healing pool?  Was Jesus oblivious, or could he see more than the average person?

The man’s response gives us a clue:

Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda a and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”

“Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”
John 5:1-7

His answer was not “yes,” or “obviously!”, but a valid excuse for why healing could not happen.  Here he was, in the presence of THE healer, and his mind is so coddled by hopelessness that he can only see the barriers.

We can’t blame him.  He did indeed have no one to help.  He had wrestled for 38 years trying to get well.  Most frustratingly of all, people who needed healing less than him stepped over him daily into the pool; on a daily basis he watched healthier people “steal” the healing he deserved.  Optimism had gotten him nothing and no where.

Did he want to get well?  His answer wasn’t “no,” but it had become impossible to know how to say “yes.”

Some of you have been praying and waiting for a healing that just never seems to come.  You’ve had others pray, visited countless doctors, and watched years pass and things get worse.  It’s become harder and harder to know what to hope for.  Who is the Healer in these moments?

It is a difficult question.  As I type, I am reminded of a friend who spent a decade navigating chronic pain, boldly seeking God for restoration, only to be hit with new, undiagnosable issues this year.  I think of another friend who sought prayers and interventions for his wife’s breast cancer, only to lose her this summer.  Both are right now honest about their pain around the healing that seemed to elude their situation.

How might they feel if Jesus said to them, “Do you want to get well?”  How might you feel amidst your long-suffering?  I imagine I might feel offended: “You know I do!  You’ve heard me praying for healing for years, and have done nothing!  How dare you ask me such a dishonoring thing?”

I suspect Jesus was not careless when he approached this man — one amidst many others who needed healing — and asked what seemed to all of them a ridiculous question.  Jesus — who frequently knew what others were thinking and feeling — understood what was going on deep within this man, more than the man himself, and asked a question that cut to the core.  I wish the text shared that insight, but all we get is the question, the man’s response, and “Then Jesus said to him, ‘Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.’ At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.” (v.8-9)  He does not say, “here’s why I asked,” or “here’s the deeper healing I’m working on,” only, “Do you want to get well,” and “Get up, you’re healed.”

We usually take this passage as a beautiful and powerful testimony — which it is — but miss the full experience of a man who had waited 38 years, was asked a strange question, and then all at once was restored.  We miss the reality of the others at the pool who may have put their hands up and shouted, “Now ask me!  I want to be healed to” only to find that the Healer has slipped away. (v13)  This text is inspiring to the person who is not in need of healing, encouraging to the person at the start of their healing journey, but perplexing to the one who has been waiting years, or who knows — like my friend that lost his wife — that the healing longed-for will not be.

What should they do with Jesus’s odd question?

It could be that the “simple” question Jesus is asking you is not simple at all, but hits on a deep, eternal level that points to something greater than the healing for which you long.  We interpret “get well” as “not be disabled”, but it could be that Jesus’s definition of wellness was “immeasurably more” than the man was asking for or imagining.  We only see the healing of his body, but what if he was made well in far greater ways — restoration of his faith, his relationships, his sense of identity and purpose — and Jesus’s question resonated in his head as these deeper healings became clear?

What if years later he thought, “I actually met the Messiah, and he essentially offered me full life, but I was so focused on how to get in a pool.”  He wouldn’t feel shame around this — after all, 38 years is exceptionally long and he had invested so much into getting into the pool — but all those years would feel more and more like “light and momentary troubles” the more he came to understand the fullness of the eternal life Jesus had given him, and the new creation he was becoming:

For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
2 Corinthians 4:17-18

Your struggles do not feel neither light nor momentary, and yet there is a promise of an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.  Jesus knows this, and this is the “well” he offers.

Do you want to get well?