Do You Want to Get Well? A Therapist’s Integrative Look at John 5 and Change
John 5: 1-6
“Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one for the Jewish festivals. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda 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?”
I have always marveled at this passage. “Do you want to get well?” can feel like such a loaded question. Upon reflection, I am typically met with a host of questions that aim to understand the heart of those involved.
Was the man hardened, resigned to his chronic misery? Was he engulfed in self-pity, shaped by years of seeing himself as a victim? Was he simply hopeless? I wonder what the attitudes of the bystanders witnessing the man were. Judgmental? Condemnation? Pity? Or worse, was he merely nonexistent?
And then there was Jesus.
Many times, I have imagined the tone of His voice. Was there any hint of frustration? Did He offer the question full of expectation, with a lifted brow and hands lazily raised: “Do you want to get better or not?” Or is it possible that He kneeled before a man buried by despair and, with the intention only characteristic of the Creator, extended softly:
“Do you want to get well?”
It strikes me that the man’s response resembles what therapists might call a defense mechanism, a way we protect ourselves when something feels too painful or difficult to face directly:
“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 5:7
The man did not address Jesus’ question directly. He could have simply answered, “Yes,” or, “Yes, but I do not know how.” Instead, his answer seems to explain why he cannot change his circumstances. His response is understandable. He has been in this condition for thirty-eight years, and he has learned to see his situation through the lens of what he cannot do and what others have not done for him.
We should be careful not to assume that this means he did not want to get well. A person can genuinely desire change and still experience resistance to it.
Sometimes, that resistance is not conscious. Beneath it may be unmet needs, fears, or familiar ways of coping that have become deeply rooted over time. Even when we consciously long for something different, these parts of us can work against the change we desire. This does not mean that we do not want to change. Rather, it may reveal something worth becoming curious about.
What is it about the familiar that feels necessary? What might we fear losing if we change? What need has been met, even imperfectly, by the way we have learned to cope?
Perhaps this is part of what Jesus’ question invites us to consider. “Do you want to get well?” may not simply be a question of whether we desire healing. It may also invite us to consider what within us is afraid of the change that healing requires.
We are told that the man had been an invalid for thirty-eight years and that he was among many others who were blind, lame, and paralyzed. The pool of Bethesda, whose name is often understood as “house of mercy,” was associated with the hope of healing. Yet the man’s experience at the pool had not delivered him from his suffering.
I have empathy for the man in that he grew familiar with his ailments and familiar with an environment that had not delivered on its promise of healing. In fact, the environment excluded his type of suffering. It was unrealistic to believe that a man saturated by weakness of body and spirit could win the competition to reach the pool first.
Sometimes, we become so familiar with our pain, so familiar with our ways of coping with pain, that the idea of change is jarring, if not unbelievable.
We may justify in our minds that change is good and that we wish for it. We may even attempt to manufacture change through shows of willpower. We try harder. Yet the trying eventually fades because our patterns of thinking, feeling, and responding have become so deeply established that mere willpower is often not enough to overcome them.
In a paradoxical fashion, these internal patterns may become our safest mode of being, not because they objectively are, but because we know no other way. Therefore, we cling to a kind of internal pseudo-safety. Meanwhile, in the recesses of our hearts, we quietly tremble at the prospect of change because to change means that we may lose the familiar ways we have learned to exist.
Sometimes, we become so familiar with our pain, so familiar with our ways of coping with pain, that the idea of change is jarring, if not unbelievable.
This is one reason therapy can be such a unique environment.
Within the safe haven of the therapeutic relationship, a person is permitted to consider their heart posture toward change. Therapy can become a place where we are invited to ask difficult questions about what we want, what we fear, and what may be keeping us from moving forward.
We see something like this unfold in Jesus’ interaction with the man at Bethesda.
“Do you want to get well?”
Jesus asks a painfully direct question. The man responds by explaining why he cannot get into the pool. Jesus does not argue with his explanation or shame him for it. Instead, Jesus says:
“Get Up! Pick up your mat and walk” - John 5:8
I imagine this statement was incomprehensible to the man.
But the man, whose pain had taken residence in his heart and left him defeated and hopeless, encountered a Man he could borrow belief from.
The man likely had no idea how to become well. Yet Jesus taught him.
Get up.
Implicitly, I believe this is part of the instruction of therapy.
As our wounds often happen in a relational context, healing can also take place within relationship. The man’s cry was, “I have no one.” In a similar way, an attuned and empathic therapeutic relationship can bring remarkable healing by awakening the heart of the sufferer.
The therapist, holding hope that change is possible, speaks to the sufferer’s heart:
Get up.
I believe change foremost occurs within the incubation of relationship. To be known rather than judged, to be cared for rather than expected of, to be invited rather than manipulated, these are conditions of security within a relational context.
And only when we feel secure in relationship can we begin to take the risk that change requires.
The process of therapy is, in part, a permission to change.
I believe change also begins through honest discourse. We cannot change who we merely pretend to be. We must approach change from where and who we are.
Change, then, could very well begin with an embrace of how apprehensive we are to change.
Perhaps this is why the question “Do you want to get well?” has so much depth beyond our initial impressions.
It would be despondent and dangerously oversimplified to assert that people do not want to change. Instead, we are asked to consider and be forthcoming about our heart posture toward change.
We may genuinely want to change while also being afraid of what change will require of us.
We may want to heal while still feeling familiar with our pain.
We may want something different while not yet knowing how to live differently.
In change, we must first lose something before we can gain a life worth wading through the fear.
It is in therapy’s alias, the house of mercy, Bethesda, that I know this to be true.
Sometimes, healing begins with a question.
Do you want to get well?
Source
Carson, D.A. (2018). NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible. Zondervan
