What do You Want?

One of the things I appreciate about serving at Orchard Hill is that the continual spiritual development of the staff is a priority. In addition to my responsibilities as the Director of Young Adult Ministries, I serve with the Student Ministries team, and as a team, Shannon, the Director of Student Ministries, encouraged us all to consider Jesus’ question to Bartimaeus found in Mark 10:46-52.

Essentially, the story is about how Bartimaeus, a blind man, calls out to Jesus for mercy and Jesus asks him plainly, “What do you want me to do for you?” We, as a team, were asked to consider for ourselves, if Jesus were asking us, what we would have Him do for us, and then pursue Him meeting us at our point of need.

I was anxious to dive into this exercise, and as I did, was not entirely prepared for what I would encounter in the text or in my heart.

In Mark 10, just before the account about Bartimaeus, Jesus asks the same question of His disciples, James and John. For the sake of space, I will not fully elaborate on comparing and contrasting James, John and Bartimaeus, their approaches, Jesus’ response and whatnot, but I would encourage each of you reading to spend some time in Mark 10:35-52 and participate in that yourself.

Here, though, is where I want to get to: James and John (actually, their mom, also, if you see the parallel passage in Matt. 20) were looking for something specific, namely glory. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know that when I’m searching for glory, I’m searching for value. I’m searching for validation maybe even vindication. I’m looking for some litmus outside of myself that proves, maybe to others, but mostly to me, that I have worth.

There are a couple of layers of irony in that whole scenario. First is that glory glibly bestowed on the inglorious does not sophisticate the savage. Rather, it tarnishes the brilliance of the initial glory. Jesus taught from the Hebrew Scriptures that when something unclean comes into contact with the unclean, the unclean does not become clean, but the clean thing loses its cleanliness. So the thing that would serve to give value to worthlessness does not actually do that, instead the once priceless thing becomes common and meager. Second, glory isn’t something that is asked for. To Jesus and His Apostles, it is something suffered for; yet another inverse operation of the Kingdom of Heaven. Paul wrote, “I want to know Christ, and the fellowship of sharing in His suffering, becoming like Him in His death.” Paul also writes in the kinosis passage of Phil. 2:5-11 that Jesus has the greatest glory because He had the greatest suffering.

Contrast this with blind Bartimaeus who simply wanted to see.

Healing.

Am I – or are you – looking for granted glory to give unwarranted value to your or my brokenness or are we looking to truly be healed? This leads to another question Jesus asked a man once.

In John 5 Jesus encounters a crippled man and asks him what seems like a stupid question, “Do you want to get well?”

Do you – do I – want to get well?

There is a song lyric that reads, “I’d rather feel the pain all too familiar than be broken by a lover I don’t understand.” If you are anything like me, you have built so much scaffolding around the brokenness of who you are to keep it from falling apart, that the idea of removing that scaffolding and letting the feeble structure of our lives do what it dying to do – collapse – is just too fearful. If the frail faltering structure that is my life already feels so poor and insignificant, what about when it falls apart and is nothing? We’d rather cling with stingy lockjaw to our scraps, and then ask Jesus to bestow glory on it.

He will do no such thing.

He asks:

“Do you want to get well?”

“What do you want me to do for you?”

He invites us to follow Him, to be like Him, to do what He’s done; to abandon whatever we consider our value, to become nothing, to suffer. He invites us to this so that we can be healed. So that we can receive true and real value. He invites us to participate in His own humiliation and glory like in Phil. 2:5-11. And, honestly, I don’t know what that looks like for each of us. I think that’s the point. Do I, and do you, trust Christ implicitly? Do we trust that because He’s done it, we should?

He asks:

“What do you want me to do for you?”

“Do you want to get well?”