What Do You Want?

The road out of Jericho climbs.

Jerusalem sits roughly three thousand feet higher, and the way up runs through dry hills. Mark says Jesus was walking out in front, and that the people following him were amazed and afraid. He had just told them, for the third time, what was going to happen to him when they got there.

A crowd was going with him anyway. Jericho was the last town before the climb, and the road out of it was a good place for a blind man to sit, because everybody going up to the city had to pass.

A blind beggar named Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, was sitting beside the road.

Mark gives him a name, and his father’s name too, which is unusual for a beggar healed on a roadside. Nobody knows why. One common guess is that Mark’s first readers knew him or knew of him, that he was still telling the story years later. That’s a reasonable guess and only a guess. The text just keeps his name, and that’s more than most people in his position ever got.

He couldn’t see the crowd. He could hear it. And when he found out who was passing, he started shouting.

Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!

Son of David was a king’s title. The promised king was supposed to come from David’s line, and here was a blind man on the ground shouting it at a teacher walking by on foot, in dusty clothes, with no crown and no army. A few days later a whole crowd would be shouting about the coming kingdom of our father David as Jesus rode into Jerusalem. Bartimaeus said it first, from the side of the road, before he’d ever laid eyes on him.

The people around him told him to be quiet. Many people admonished him to be silent.

It’s easy to make them the villains, and they weren’t. A procession was moving, a teacher was on his way somewhere important, and a man on the ground was yelling. Most people in that crowd would have done the same thing. Keep it down. Not now. This isn’t the time.

Bartimaeus did the opposite. He cried out all the louder.

Then this. Jesus stopped.

Everything moving stopped. The man walking out front toward the hardest week of his life stopped for a voice he couldn’t see yet, and told them to call him over.

He didn’t walk over to the man. He had him called. There’s something in that. Bartimaeus had shouted from where he sat, and now he would have to get up and cross the distance himself, blind, toward a voice, through the same people who’d been telling him to be quiet. Jesus stayed where he was and waited while he came. He was never going to leave. But he let the man make the last few steps, and he let him do it without being able to see where he was putting his feet.

The same crowd that had told him to hush now told him something else. Take courage! they said. Get up! He is calling for you. Nobody had to change their mind about him. They just passed along the call.

Luke’s account adds how it ended for that crowd. Once the man could see, all the people, when they saw it, gave praise to God. The same people who had told him to be quiet ended up louder than he was. Nobody in the story is written off, including the ones who got it wrong for a minute.

Throwing off his cloak, Bartimaeus jumped up and came to Jesus.

The text doesn’t say what the cloak meant to him. Many readers picture a beggar’s cloak, the thing he spread out on the ground to catch coins and pulled around himself at night, maybe the only thing he owned. That’s inference, not text. What the text does say is that he threw it off and got up before he could see where he was going.

Then Jesus asked him a question.

What do you want Me to do for you?

It sounds like an odd thing to ask a blind man. Anyone could see what he needed. But Jesus asked anyway, and he wanted the man to say it.

This is the second time in one chapter he’s asked that question. A few verses earlier, two of his closest followers, James and John, had come to him and said, Teacher, we want You to do for us whatever we ask. And he asked them the same question, word for word. What do you want Me to do for you? They asked to sit on his right and his left in his glory.

That’s not a sin to hold against them. They had left their nets and their father to follow him, they seem to have believed he was about to be crowned, and they asked for what people who have given everything often ask for. A place. A title. A seat near the front.

The man by the road asked for something else.

Rabboni, said the blind man, let me see again.

Four words, and the first one is only a name for him. Rabboni means my teacher. Mark’s word can mean to see again or simply to see, and the text doesn’t say whether he had ever seen before. No speech about what he’d do with it. No argument about whether he deserved it. The plainest thing he wanted, said out loud to someone who asked.

Go, said Jesus, your faith has healed you. And immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus along the road.

He asks what you want. He wasn’t guessing, and he wasn’t testing. And the answer is allowed to be plain. It doesn’t have to be spiritual enough, or large enough, or dressed up. A beggar said I want to see, and that was the whole prayer.

Where this meets your week

Being told to hush. Somewhere along the way you learned to keep it down. Maybe you asked a hard question in a room where it wasn’t welcome. Maybe you grieved longer than people were comfortable with. Maybe nobody said anything, and you just felt it. The people who hushed Bartimaeus weren’t cruel. They were busy and a little embarrassed. He didn’t argue with them. He just got louder in the other direction. If there’s something you stopped saying to God because somebody made it feel out of place, say it this week, as loud as you like, in the car or on a walk where nobody can hear.

The prayer that got vague. When prayer stops working, a lot of people stop asking for anything specific. It turns into bless everybody or nothing at all. It’s safer that way. Nothing specific, nothing to be disappointed about. Jesus made a blind man say the specific thing out loud. Notice how long it’s been since you asked for something in plain words, and what it is.

The cloak. Most people have an arrangement they’ve made with the hard thing in their life. A way of sitting with it that at least keeps the cold off. Throwing it off before you can see is a real risk, and the text doesn’t pretend it isn’t. You don’t have to throw everything off this week. Just name what your cloak is, the thing you’ve arranged your life around so you don’t have to ask.

After the ask. He got his sight and followed on a road that led up into the worst week of the whole story. Getting what you asked for doesn’t mean the road gets easy. If something you prayed for once did come, and life still turned hard after, that doesn’t cancel the answer. Write down one thing that came when you asked, even if it was a long time ago.

Answer the question.

Tonight, somewhere alone, say it out loud: What do you want Me to do for you? Then answer it in one plain sentence. Not the thing you think you should want. The thing you actually want. It might be I want to sleep through the night. It might be I want my son to call. It might be I want to know you’re there.

Say it once and let it stand. You don’t have to explain it.

If the honest answer embarrasses you, say it anyway. If it seems too small to bother him with, say it anyway. If you doubt anyone hears it, say it anyway. He stopped a whole procession to hear a sentence this plain, and he didn’t grade it. Then sit a minute afterward, in the quiet, before you move on.

Mark’s very next chapter opens with the approach to Jerusalem.

Somewhere on that climb, among the crowd going up, was a man who had been looking at the world for about as long as it takes to walk out of Jericho. Mark doesn’t say anything more about him. The last we hear, he’s on the road, following, seeing everything for the first time.