“What Do You Want Me to Do for You?”

Mark 10:46-52

October 28, 2018

I.

The city of Jericho is the last stop on the traditional pilgrimage path to Jerusalem.  It is east of Jerusalem, near the Jordan River.  People would overnight in Jericho and get up early in the morning to walk the last 15 or so miles, uphill — the elevation difference is 3400 feet — to the holy city.  This is what Jesus and his disciples are doing.  

Because there are so many religious pilgrims taking this path all the time, beggars would line the road, hoping to find people in a charitable frame of mind going by.  In today’s story it is also a week or so before Passover, so the road is particularly crowded.  

So with all these people making their way out of the city and up the steep road, and probably many beggars by the side calling out for alms, it is interesting that the story singles out only one.  We even know his name.  It’s Bartimaeus, or “Son of Timaeus.”  (My theory about people in the gospels who are named is that they later become figures in the earliest churches where they tell their stories and people personally remember them.)

There is a crowd of people going by.  Bartimaeus is sitting there with other beggars, his shabby cloak spread out in front of him to catch any coins people might toss his way.  And in the middle of this noisy commotion Bartimaeus hears that Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples are among them.  So he starts yelling at the top of his lungs, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!  Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

This is the first time in this gospel that anyone calls Jesus by this title, “Son of David.”  Son of David is a fairly loaded term.  It means Messiah.  It means king.  It means descendant of the great King David and heir to his throne.  It seems that what Bartimaeus has heard about Jesus is that he is going to be, or at least try to be, the new king.  That’s probably why people scold him to be quiet.  There are likely to be police around, and proclaiming someone to be king, especially among a crowd of people on their way to Jerusalem for Passover, the holiday celebrating the people’s liberation, is a good way to become a person of interest to them.  

Amid all the yelling, Bartimaeus is the one voice Jesus hears.  Jesus stops and instructs that people bring to him this noisy blind guy who is calling him the new king.  It could have been just to get him to be quiet about the “Son of David” stuff, which could attract unwanted attention.  But on the other hand, this is exactly the kind of person Jesus has come to serve as the king for: a blind beggar camped out on the side of the road in Jericho.

The people, who were telling Bartimaeus to pipe down, now urge him to take heart because Jesus is calling him.  He enthusiastically throws off his cloak, whatever coins he might have collected go flying, rolling, and jingling on the ground.  He jumps up and makes his way to Jesus, perhaps led by some of the other people.  And Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?”

II.

It is the exact same question that Jesus asks of the last people who approach him with the expectation that he would be king, his disciples, James and John, from last week’s reading.  It is the same question that Jesus asks of every one of us.  “What do you want me to do for you?”

For James and John it doesn’t go very well, as you may recall.  They are asking for positions of power in the new administration, which is not what Jesus is about.  But Bartimaeus replies, “My teacher, let me see again.”  He just wants his sight back.  He wants to be a normal guy.  He wants to be restored to his full humanity, with all his senses intact.

Bartimaeus shows such trust in Jesus that he abandons his only source of income, his cloak.  He may have even just thrown away all the money he had to his name.  Contrast this with the pious man earlier in the chapter who could not give up his possessions when Jesus required it of him.  Bartimaeus gives up his possessions on his own, without being asked.  He comes to Jesus blind and having made himself voluntarily penniless.

So that question, “What do you want me to do for you?”  How it gets answered is going to depend on how we come to Jesus and what we are asking for.  Is it personal glory and honor based on a misconception about Jesus’ identity and mission?  Is it all about us?

Or is it wholeness, integrity, health, and sight, based on a deeper, intuitive understanding of who Jesus is and what he can do?  Do we come burdened by our baggage: our biases, our expectations, our hopes and dreams, our egocentric personal desires, even our theology?  Or do we come having divested ourselves of our baggage, our possessions, our old life, our wealth, our only means of support?  Do we trust Jesus that much?  Just on the basis of his call, with no guarantee that we are going to receive what we ask for?

Bartimaeus doesn’t ask for anything except to be real and whole as a human being.  He abandons everything he owns because he knows that what he has is not who he is, and it is worth it to sacrifice what he has in order to just have the chance to be who he truly is.  And he knows that this Jesus is the One who is able to bring him back to himself, to restore his sight, to make him whole, to recover for him his true Self.

As he stands before Jesus then, the Lord says to him, “Go.  Your faith has made you well.  Trusting in me is to trust in who you really are; it is to trust in the true humanity I reveal and which you and I share; it is to access something already deep within you that was always there.  Your faith in me is faith in your own deepest Self.  Not your little, blind, lame egocentric self crying for handouts on the side of the road; your expansive, inclusive, eternal, heavenly Self: your Self in Me.  That is what you have discovered.”

III.

What do we want Jesus to do for us?  Buy us a Mercedes Benz, for those old enough to remember that song?

One of the ways of understanding Christianity is as a path for changing what we want so that what we want is what Jesus Christ gives us.  This is distinct from and opposed to what we are taught to want from our earliest days, which are those three things that Satan offers Jesus in the wilderness — which is, by the way, the same Judean badlands that the road from Jericho passed through.  We may reduce those to wealth, fame, and power.  Those are the things we have been taught to want for the sake of our own security and success.  Those are the things that matter to us, in our egocentric frame of reference, which is really a form of blindness that sums up the human condition that Bartimaeus represents here, the last day before Jesus gets to Jerusalem.

What we don’t want — and often don’t even know enough for it to occur to us that we should want, because we imagine that we already have it, when we don’t — is to see.  We think we see just fine, and that this existence of doing whatever gets people to throw us some money is just normal.  

Bartimaeus throws away the distracting shiny stuff that everyone says he should value when he perceives that he has a chance at receiving something real.  The fact that he sees things clearly enough at the beginning of the story to know that Jesus is the One he needs to get to shows that he really could see all along.  His body just needs to get the memo.

In teaching us what to want, Jesus teaches us what we already have and who we already are as humans fashioned in God’s Image.  The highest and best thing to want is what we are in God’s sight.  It is to be human as Jesus reveals our true humanity.  It is to be one with all things and all people.  It is to be one with God.  When we can have the insight to want that, we will receive it, along with everything else.

This week, in thinking about the throng of people on pilgrimage from Jericho to Jerusalem, I couldn’t help thinking about the caravan of refugees now walking through southern Mexico on their way to the US border.  If, in Jesus, there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, there is also no us and them in this case.  That’s what it means to see.  Jesus doesn’t care about the lines on a map or the laws that the establishment leaders wrote into some books.  He is a refugee himself, as an infant in Egypt.  We share a common humanity in him with everyone, especially refugees who, like Bartimaeus, leave everything to be on the way to something better.

IV.

Bartimaeus immediately regains his sight and falls into the group, following Jesus “on the way.”  Mark knows that “on the way” means first that he joins the throng of people on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  He meets and is welcomed by the disciples who no doubt start telling him the stories of Jesus’ ministry so far, introducing him to other healed people from as far back as when they were all up in Galilee.

But there is another meaning to “on the way.”  The early church calls itself “the Way.”  All of us who are disciples of Jesus over the last 2000 years are, in a sense on the same Way.  It is the Way of the cross and the resurrection.  It is the Way of repentance in which we acquire a new mind and start living in a new manner.  It is the Way of losing what we have in order to gain everything.  It is the Way of unity with all creation, the Way of blessing, the Way of compassion and service, humility, justice, peace, and love.

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