What do you want?

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/052616.cfm

1 Peter 2:2-5, 9-12
Mark 10:46-52

“What do you want me to do for you?” 

That’s what Jesus asks Bartimaeus in today’s Gospel reading from Luke. What a great question Jesus poses. So much lies behind his offer to Bartimaeus, and looks forward to our own pleas today for God’s help. 

The same story about Bartimaeus, the blind man, is told in Matthew and Luke, albeit with different details. A blind man calls out for Jesus to help, and a crowd of people shush him for bothering the Master. Jesus, instead, shushes the crowd. All his focus is on the blind man’s plea. 

The question from Jesus presents Bartimaeus with an opportunity unlike anything heard before in human history. Jesus, the man who has made specific claims to be one with God, the Messiah, the only begotten Son of the Father, asks a pitiful man, “What do you want me to do for you?” 

Behind Jesus’ question is more than a simple request. Jesus puts himself on the hot seat for all humanity, for all time, to witness. Jesus wants each of us to know what Bartimaeus believes that Jesus can do for him. In Mark, this scene comes just before Jesus makes his entry into Jerusalem, fulfilling an ancient prophecy that the Messiah will come to the holy city and claim his place.

“Jesus, son of David, have pity on me,” Bartimaeus calls out. What does he expect to receive from Jesus’ pity? Get him a new cloak? Buy him lunch? No. He wants to “see,” and he believes Jesus can accomplish this for him.

Does Bartimaeus know that Jesus is God? Not likely. He called him Son of David, a name coined for the Messiah. The Son of David is a descendant of the Hebrew lineage who had the power, better the “authority,” to appeal to God directly. The Spirit of God would live in the Messiah. The Messiah as “one with God” did not clearly mean to the Hebrews that he would be God incarnate, God being born a human being.

Jesus singled Bartimaeus out of the crowd to illuminate for us all what the Messiah can do, and why he will do it.

Bartimaeus understood that God would listen to the Messiah in a way prophesied by the prophets. He would be able to cure the sick and heal the blind and lame. Anyone filled with the Holy Spirit was thought to have a direct channel to God. The Messiah is the epitome of what the Jewish people knew of each prophet’s gifts and authority.

I’ve got two brothers whom I could ask at any time for help. I have four sisters whom I could ask the same thing. I seldom reach out to them for help, though. I don’t want to bother them. They have full lives. I can wrestle through my issues, I assure myself. 

All of my siblings are believers. That’s incredible, isn’t it? They all have been filled with the Holy Spirit, and have received the same power and authority as Jesus. Jesus tells us this. Jesus, who we now know, after all that the gospels have told us, and what Pentecost brought to the disciples, expects from each of us the same faith, hope and love that the Holy Spirit conferred upon his followers. 

At a core level, perhaps, I don’t believe that the Holy Spirit can actually work the wonders of Jesus through my family of believers. Certainly, more on the surface, I probably don’t want to show my own weakness and fear. I conclude my hesitation though with the excuse that I don’t want to worry them when both distance and obligations separate us. 

I know the same is true for my siblings. Infrequent chats confirm that we are surviving quite well on or own. We have a mutual, and not entirely silent, agreement to maintain our independence and respect for privacy. 

Also, we weigh the consequences of asking for help. One of our sisters or brothers will talk with another, and then the request will get spun up. We wait awhile before asking for help, because maybe it’ll work itself out, or maybe our problem hasn’t elevated to a critical level, yet. 

When our problem has gone beyond critical, when it seems too late to invoke help from our siblings, the fear take over. The bug has already hit the windshield. The flood has already destroyed our house. The solicitors have already delivered the papers. The doctor has already diagnosed our problem. The IRS has already scheduled our audit. 

And that’s when I and my siblings finally reach out to each other and ask for prayers. We’re OK with asking for prayers. We eagerly hand off both voiced and assumed requests to God. But we still do it with hesitation. “Hey, put me on your prayer list for a couple days,” we’ll mention. “What’s up?” we’ll reply, not sure if we really want to know. And, if we don’t want each other to know, we’ll answer back, “Nothing super serious. Just need a spiritual boost to get through a difficulty.”

Frankly, that’s usually all it takes. 

“Thanks for the prayers,” we’ll say. Maybe. Well, almost never, actually. But we know the prayers helped. If nothing else, we spent personal time handing each other off to God, and musing with God about someone we love, knowing innately that God will respond.

Do we know the power of our prayer, the authority we bring to the Holy Spirit with our pleas? Underneath the fear and hesitation, I believe we do.

Why is that? Why do we rely on the efficacy and power of our prayers? Because we know that God loves us just like our parents loved us when we were young. We’re absolutely certain about that. When we were children we immediately called to our mom or dad in a crisis. We knew they would help. They would drop everything.

Our siblings will also drop everything. That’s the very reason we don’t call them. Our siblings are not our parents. Truly, we didn’t bother our own parents after we were ten or eleven. Not until something was broken that we couldn’t fix. That first time, though when disaster struck and our parents were unable to fix our problem, that’s when we turned to God. God, though, I believe, urges us to reach out to our family and friends, to our fellow believers, and calls us to seek God’s necessary intervention together.

We all eventually learn to turn to God when we see the limitations of everyone we know and love. We have seen their stunned faces, and watched their shoulders bend from just sharing the weight of our problem. Often, I believe, God allows tragedy to mount for this very reason. To bring us together.

God has heard and seen it all. We hesitate to bother God with our little things. Most of us wait until an issue goes critical before we toss in a winced and worried murmur for God’s help. God is OK with that. He’d prefer our constant relationship, I’m sure. But, he’s OK with our procrastination. It’ll probably hurt worse though!

When a sibling or friend ask for prayers, we have no problem turning to God. 

“My sister needs your help,” we might pray. “I don’t know what’s up, but if she asked for prayers it is pretty important.” Then we pause for a bit. We don’t realize it, but we’re running over our love relationship with our sister. We worry, which is what our sister didn’t want us to do. “She needs your help,” we repeat. “I can’t really help her, and she needs you.”

That’s when we call the rest of our family, and we instinctually invoke our authority. We have to dust it off, well it up within us, and lean upon each other for support in our belief.

The situation seems far worse when we have no siblings who will reach out to God for us, or if none of our friends believe that God will repair a broken life, heal an infirmity, or consider our plea. Bartimaeus was in that position. He was alone in his plea. None around him grasped the essential importance of calling out to God together.

Jesus made sure they all heard from Bartimaeus, though Jesus knew that even as he rode into Jerusalem in the next few days, died soon after, rose from the dead three days after that, and then ascended into heaven another 40 days later, that even then they would not understand the need to call out together to God.

It was only when the Holy Spirit filled each of the believers. In the first reading, Peter sums up the entire purpose of growing into salvation. HIs words were spoken to the Hebrew believers, his close family of brothers and sisters. But soon, these same words included the “aliens and sojourners,” and us, the Gentiles. These are our words from God through Peter, for the Bartimaeus’ of the world, and for us.

You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, 

a holy nation, a people of his own,

so that you may announce the praises of him

who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

Once you were no people

but now you are God’s people;

you had not received mercy

but now you have received mercy.

                                 1 Peter  2:9-10