In the classic film, “The Wizard of Oz”, Dorothy is transported by a funnel cloud from her family farm in Kansas to the land of Oz. There she meets the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, who has no brain, and the Tin Man, who has no heart. The four friends embark on a dangerous journey to the Emerald City, where they hope to meet with the “Great and Powerful Oz,” who will send Dorothy back home, give the Cowardly Lion courage, the Scarecrow a brain, and the Tin Man a heart. Together, they face many obstacles, including an evil witch, flying monkeys, and poisonous flowers. Finally, they reach the Emerald City and go before Oz, who, as it turns out, is not great and powerful at all, but an ordinary man operating a holographic head behind a curtain. 

As one of my college philosophy professors would remind his young, idealistic students: “The level of how much you are anticipating an event is directly proportional to the level of disappointment you will feel when that event finally happens.” In other words, if you are pinning all your hopes on an all-powerful wizard, chances are good that you will find a charlatan behind a curtain with no real power at all.

If first-century Jerusalem was likened to the Emerald City, then the pool of Bethesda was the “Great and Powerful Oz.” It consisted of two pools surrounded by a covered colonnade or portico that ran between the pools, thus making the five porticos that John describes. The pools were fed by natural springs and surrounded by people hoping for a miracle. Centuries after John had written his Gospel and probably after the springs which filled the pools were dried up, scribes added a local legend surrounding the pool that an angel would stir the waters and the first person to enter the pool would be healed. Many modern Bibles have omitted this detail, which explains why John 5:4 is not in some Bibles. The legend, like the pool itself these days, was empty. It must have been a hopeless place full of desperate people who had exhausted all other means of getting well, now lying beside the waters of Bethesda. Day after day, they would stare at the waters waiting for a ripple on the surface, which could not be explained away. When that happened (or perhaps more accurately, when someone imagined it happened), a cruel race for the ill, the elderly, and the disabled would ensue with no real winners.

When Jesus came upon this scene, John says simply in verse 6 that the Savior “knew” a particular man had been there a “long time.” The Greek phrase that John uses implies both the divine knowledge of Jesus and the exceedingly great number of days that the man had lain by the pool. The first important point in this story is the difference between what God knows and what we know. When Jesus asks, “Do you want to get well?” He already knows the answer. He already knows that, unlike the paralytic who was lowered through the roof (Luke 8:26-39), this man has no one to help him. Jesus knows and understands that even though this man goes to Bethesda every day, there is no healing in the pool for him. 

Our creator God knows exactly what we need to be healed and whole. He also knows our futile attempts to save ourselves. He knows our shame when we have done wrong, and we try to hide like Adam and Eve in Eden’s bushes. He even knows our hiding places. (By the way, how long do you think Adam and Eve could have stayed hidden from God in God’s own garden?) God knows we cannot hide away our sin sickness forever. He knows we cannot heal ourselves. He understands the exceedingly great number of times we have tried. Like the man by the pool of Bethesda, God understands that trying to make ourselves well is an empty and futile exercise. The man has no hope of getting well, yet he continues to do the same thing day after day. Jesus asks a fair question: “Do you want to get well?”

The man never answers Jesus’ question. “‘I can’t, sir,’ the sick man said, ‘for I have no one to put me into the pool when the water bubbles up. Someone else always gets there ahead of me’” (John 5:7). Perhaps the man was implying that Jesus should wait with him for the water to be stirred and volunteer to shove him in the water when the time comes. The second important point is that if we want to grasp hold of what God has for us, we cannot keep doing things the way that we have always done them. Rather than simply saying, “Yes! I want to be well,” the man explains how all his attempts in the past have failed. Economists call this the Sunk Cost Fallacy. It is continuing to put time, money, and resources toward something even though the costs far outweigh the benefits. The cost to this man of sitting by this pool day after day far outweighed any benefit he might have gained from the pool itself. The Sunk Cost Fallacy is often the reason why we continue to watch a terrible movie, read a terrible book or remain in a bad situation. 

Like the man by the pool, we rationalize that eventually our investment will pay off. We are so averse to losing the time and effort that we have already invested that we continue to invest. This sort of thinking can completely arrest our spiritual growth. Imagine if William Booth had decided that he had spent far too much time learning to be a pawnbroker to give it up. The Salvation Army would never have been born. When the Holy Spirit calls us in a new or different direction, instead of saying “yes,” we, like the man by the pool, often reply with a litany of all the things we have already tried.

The response of Jesus to the man is simple and profound. He does not argue or rationalize. “Jesus told him, ‘Stand up, pick up your mat and walk’” (John 5:8). It is a very simple principle: No one can walk while lying beside the pool. This man had a choice to make. He could follow the rules of the Pharisees and continue to lie beside a pool which would never make him well, or he could break the rules by rising, picking up his mat, and walking away. He could not do both. He had to choose. 

The third important principle is that following Jesus means making a choice. It is often a choice that puts us at odds with the world around us. First John 2:15 tells us, “Do not love this world nor the things it offers you, for when you love the world, you do not have the love of the Father in you.” When the Pharisees confront the man for carrying his mat on the Sabbath, we discover that he does not even know who healed him. For much of this story, Jesus is the one without a name. When the Savior’s identity is revealed, the healed man turns him in, and the Pharisees turn against him. It is a twist in this story that stretches believability, and yet it is a reaction that is all too common. In English, we even have a phrase that warns against it, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” It speaks to our inclination to question and look suspiciously upon anything that was received free of charge or without reciprocation. The bigger or more extravagant the gift, the more suspicious we become. In fact, if the modern-day equivalent of a horse, a car perhaps, suddenly showed up at your house, most of us would investigate further. 

The foundation of our faith is accepting God’s free gift in the person of Jesus Christ. We must embrace His love and grace. We must accept the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit. It is a miracle that we cannot adequately explain and that we can never repay. The only catch is that to make room for this gift, we need to clear everything else away. The man and the Pharisees in this story could not accept the beautiful life-giving gift that literally stood in front of them in the person of Jesus. What he had given was too much, too extravagant and ironically too costly to accept.

By the end of this passage, Jesus seeks out the man to give him a warning: “Now you are well; so stop sinning or something even worse may happen to you” (John 5:14), and according to verse 18, the Pharisees decided to increase their efforts to kill Jesus. No wonder this man has gone down in history as one of, if not the least grateful man in the entire Bible. This brings us to our last important principle in this story: compared to 38 years of lying beside a pool of hopelessness, eternity without the Savior is much longer and much worse. When the gift of God’s presence in Jesus is revealed to us, what will our choice be? Will we be full of excuses and rationalizations? Perhaps foolishly believing that God does not know everything about our lives. Will God find us unwilling or unable to let go of the things of the past? Can we bring ourselves to clear all the junk from our lives and to make room for the Savior of the world? Are we ready to leave behind the pool of hopelessness, to take up our mat, and to follow Jesus wherever he leads? Our answers to these questions today determine our eternity, so let us carefully consider what our answer will be. May God give us the strength and wisdom to answer in our hearts with the words from song #872:

I will follow Thee, my Saviour,

Thou hast shed Thy blood for me;

And though all the world forsake Thee

By Thy grace I’ll follow Thee.

Rise Up and Walk: John 5:1–15

Afterward Jesus returned to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish holy days. Inside the city, near the Sheep Gate, was the pool of Bethesda, with five covered porches. Crowds of sick people—blind, lame, or paralyzed—lay on the porches. One of the men lying there had been sick for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him and knew he had been ill for a long time, he asked him, “Would you like to get well?”

“I can’t, sir,” the sick man said, “for I have no one to put me into the pool when the water bubbles up. Someone else always gets there ahead of me.”

Jesus told him, “Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk!”

Instantly, the man was healed! He rolled up his sleeping mat and began walking! But this miracle happened on the Sabbath, so the Jewish leaders objected. They said to the man who was cured, “You can’t work on the Sabbath! The law doesn’t allow you to carry that sleeping mat!”

But he replied, “The man who healed me told me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’”

“Who said such a thing as that?” they demanded.

The man didn’t know, for Jesus had disappeared into the crowd. But afterward Jesus found him in the Temple and told him, “Now you are well; so stop sinning, or something even worse may happen to you.” Then the man went and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had healed him.

llustration by Nicole Rifkin

This article was originally titled “Nameless and Known: A Hopeless Man by a Pool” in the May 2026 issue of The War Cry.