Mark 10:46 They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. 47 When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48 Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” 49 Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” 50 So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. 51 Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” 52 Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
“What do you want me to do for you?” This is the question that Jesus asks Bartimaeus son of Timaeus on the side of the road. What do you want me to do for you? Bartimaeus has been crying out to Jesus and when others hear him they try to shush him—his unseemliness bothers their nice, polite sensibilities—but he just cries out louder, “Have mercy on me!” Until Jesus invites him near and asks, “What do you want me to do for you?”
This is a story about desire, about the longings that emerge from our vulnerability and how God hears them. “What do you want?” It’s a question that Jesus asks several times throughout the Gospels, so it seems to be an important one for what it means to be a disciple, but I wonder if it’s a question that we have the courage to ask ourselves? If God in the flesh asked you what you want, what would you say?
What do you want? I think it’s actually a question we’re discouraged from asking, or rather we’ve been taught to ask it only in pragmatic terms. Obviously what I really want is rest and for my body not to hurt and time with the people I love and work that doesn’t suck our soul from our bones, I want happiness from the experience of truth, and goodness, and beauty; but at some level we don’t believe we can really have those things so we translate the question “What do I want?” into consumer desire (so that even if I can’t have happiness I can get a little endorphin thrill from buying a new shirt or book) or into a kind of justification for our misery (well, I hate this job but it’s what’s best for my family, so of course I want it and I’d better not do anything to risk it). Capitalism is designed to keep us wanting but never asking what we really want; we’re supposed to be just dissatisfied enough that we can’t sit still, but not so much that the risks of upheaval seem better than the mock stability we think we have. Only so much desire, and that of a certain kind, will do. But our desires are precisely what Jesus wants to know. They are the ember that God’s Spirit would breath into flame. Jesus invites us to explore the deepest desires of our hearts and address God from within that longing.
In this story, Bartimaeus has a very specific answer to Jesus’ question. “Let me see again.” It’s not even a request, it’s a demand. And there’s a drama to this demand, not least because it’s impossible. As readers, we know that Jesus has already healed and exorcised many people. But this isn’t a world where a viral article or tweet would’ve provided video of that happening for everyone. There were rumors, but we all know how reliable rumors are. Just because Bartimaeus lived before modern science doesn’t mean he’s not aware that his demand is basically an impossible one; this is why Jesus identifies his demand as faith. And on another level, even within Mark’s own narrative, Jesus’ ministry begins with a flurry of signs and wonders, but then as the disciples seem to misunderstand what those miracles mean about God’s kingdom, they become fewer and fewer as Jesus moves toward the cross. So Bartimaeus makes his demand not only against it’s own unlikelihood, but against the disciples’ (and us as readers’) misinterpretation of Jesus’ wonders.
This story makes room for the worries we might carry into our reading of it, and yet Bartimaeus still makes his demand from within those worries, and that demand is the form of his faith, which I think is really important for us to hear at a church like Jubilee. I want to acknowledge that the Gospel stories about healings have a complicated history, and have at times been used to teach first of all that disability equals suffering and then secondly that suffering shows a lack of faith or even proof of sin. Disability activists and liberation theologians have rightly pointed out the ways that those teachings and the inhospitality of our world have dis-abled people: our neighbors with disabilities are good just because they (you) are here and don’t need to be healed of Down’s Syndrome or Autism or Deafness or Blindness, and we shouldn’t use those disabilities as metaphors for moral conditions. I want to affirm that, full stop.
And yet there’s also this tendency in the way that liberal or progressive Christians use those arguments, where problematizing healing passages or other stories of salvation functions less for the sake of anyone’s liberation (changing the material conditions of peoples’ lives) and more as signifiers that let us feel pleased and confirmed in ourselves for being nice progressive people unlike those awful conservative evangelicals who crudely pray about everything instead of yielding to bio-psycho-social models of medicine.
This is something I need to watch for in my own soul, this constant recursiveness, this self-consciousness that never allows faith just to cry out without first tying itself in knots. It’s good to problematize, to read Scripture against itself, to be aware of our privilege, but the risk that comes with the goods of that kind of reading which we also need to look out for is that instead of clearing away the weeds of oppression so that liberation can flower, we prune the buds themselves, as if it’s better that there be no flowers at all than any thorns left on the stems (even when those thorns might be very helpful for pricking the Powers of this world instead of each other).
What I’m trying to get at here is less the validity of certain kinds of reading and more the importance of the stories we tell about ourselves as we read Scripture and worship together. If the implicit narrative we tell about ourselves as we come to church is that we’re nice, respectable, liberal people who come here to hear how we’re not evangelical anymore, we can very easily use the language of liberation to find satisfaction in our self-realization while not actually participating in liberating work. But if the story we tell about ourselves is that we are workers, subject to the Powers and Principalities operating through capital, which move our lives according to their whims and caprice without caring for us at all, then the purpose of worship itself is to cry out, to make demands of God for salvation, for healing, for miraculous intervention into the usual movement of our days. This is why when we finish our time of communal prayer, we assert to each other that our sins are forgiven, our wounds healed, and the powers of this world defeated…We do so to assert a deeper reality and a deeper longing than what this world shows us is real and what we can desire.
It’s good to clarify what we don’t believe, but we also don’t want to let the fear that our desires are unseemly keep us from crying out to God. We don’t want to let the voices in our heads “sternly order us to be quiet” so that we’re constantly doubling back when Jesus is on the move in our midst. To have faith is to let your desires for a better world overflow in pleading or accusation or even anger. Anger at God can be a more faithful response than a resignation that refuses to allow itself to believe things really could be different. Faith grabs God by the shoulders and says, “I’m not letting go until you bless me, have mercy on me, let me have the desires of my heart, let me know what those desires really are so that I can ask for them.”
Bartimaeus’s impossible desire opens up new possibilities consonant with God’s infinite life, and so the form of his faith is an impossible demand. The desires of his heart make him rush past likelihood and politeness and respectability until he accosts God in the flesh with the one thing he needs most. His desire is ecstatic and uncontrollable and relentless—it doesn’t double back on itself so that he can only mutter, “Do I really want this? Is it right that I want this? Is God really able to do this”—it practices belief as assertion, as demand, where faith doesn’t even consider itself it’s so caught up in the desperate need for God to respond in that moment.
Friends, I want to invite us to practice this kind of faith. Over the coming week, take some time, whether it’s with your coffee in the morning or in the car after you’ve dropped your kids off or whenever you have a quiet 30 seconds, to say “God, show me what I really want.” I don’t mean, “What kind of job would let you monetize your interests?” or “What pair of shoes would give me a little boost this week?” But what do you really want? For yourself, for Jubilee, for our community, for the world? No matter how unlikely or how wild or how embarrassing, what do you really want?
And then pray for that, not as if you were a nice, competent, adult who’s mostly got your life together, but pray as if you are in need of salvation (because we all are). Don’t hem and haw like you’re sending an email to your boss, where you hope this finds God well (exclamation point) and maybe if they have time and it isn’t too much trouble (laughing emoji), then maybe the Lord could, like, circle back on this little request next week.
No, I mean pray in the imperative. Assert your desires. Make demands. God heal us, God free
us, God grow us, God feed us, God raise us up, God cast the mighty down from their thrones, God let us hold all things in common, God we will not let go or shut up or stop haranguing you until you bless us.
Pray as if God actually has the power to do those things, and if they don’t happen, shake your fist and cry out all the more, “How long, O Lord?” I’m not saying that kind of faith is a technology to manipulate the world, but it is the only posture prepared to meet new creation when it breaks through. If you’re used to talking that way to the almighty creator of the universe, maybe it won’t be so scary talking back to the authorities that run this world and your life now. That ecstatic, profligate, earnest, embarrassing kind of faith might just be the sort that struggles to make things well now. Amen.
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