What Do You Want Me to Do for You?
Last week and this week we have two very different Gospel readings with a couple of interesting similarities. Both passages are from the 10th chapter of Mark’s Gospel, and one follows directly after the other. Last week, as you may remember, Jesus and the disciples were walking toward Jerusalem when James and John, the sons of Zebedee, approached Jesus with a request. “What is it you want me to do for you,” Jesus responded. “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand, and one at your left, in your glory,” they asked. This week Bartimeaus, a blind beggar, calls out to Jesus from the side of the road. At first the disciples try to silence him, but Bartimaeus keeps calling to Jesus – “Son of David, have mercy on me.” After some time, Jesus calls him over and asks the same question of Bartimaeus as he did James and John – “What is it you want me to do for you?” Bartimeaus replies – “My teacher, let me see again.” Jesus asks the same question both times, but two very different requests are made.
If you think about it, the irony found in these two passages is quite interesting. Bartimaeus is physically blind, he cannot see his hand in front of his face. But even in his blindness he knows who Jesus is, “Son of David,” he calls him. Bartimeaus may be blind, but he can see that Jesus is the Messiah and that he has come to heal the world. James and John, on the other hand, may well have had 20/20 vision, but they were blind as bats when it came to understanding the purpose of Jesus’ ministry and the nature of his Kingdom. James and John wanted power and prestige, and they asked Jesus for it. Bartimaeus, on the other hand, wanted to be healed, he wanted to see. Bartimaeus got what he asked for, Jesus healed him. James and John did not, instead they were told – “whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be servant of all.”
Power or healing, what should we ask for?
The election is almost upon us, it’s just nine days away, and if you are paying attention, you can feel the tension and anxiety rising, especially in this town where politics hangs in the air like humidity in August. I know people are worried, some people are scared, and lots of people on either side of the aisle think that those on the other side are as blind as Bartimeaus and unable see reality. It is easy to feel helpless these days, like we are being carried forward by forces much larger than our own.
Lately, I have been asking myself – As a Christian, what, if anything, should I be doing during this particular moment in our national life? It’s not an easy question to answer. However, I read a speech by author and journalist Peter Wehner the other day that lays out pretty clearly what I don’t want to be doing. Wehner writes, “The way many Christians are engaging in politics is troubling . . . In too many cases, those who claim to be followers of Jesus are subordinating the Christian faith to political tribalism, partisan loyalties, and political power; and in doing so they are using methods and means that are fundamentally at odds with,” the way of Jesus. “My concern,” he continues, “is that many Christians are not offering an alternative to the worst tendencies in our society but rather accelerating them. We need to turn that around.”1
And so, in the spirit of James, John, and good old Bartimeaus, I ask myself – where are my blind spots, where are our blind spots, how does our blindness contribute to those worst tendencies in our society that Peter Wehner is talking about, and how do we heal that blindness.
Not too long ago, I came upon a fascinating and quite surprising statistic that helped me to see one of my blind spots. Let me ask you a question. From your experience, if you had to guess, what percentage of the American population would you say has a college degree – 60%, 70%? According to the Census Bureau’s most recent findings 37.7% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree or higher – 37%! If all I had to go on was my own experience of the people I encounter in my day-to-day life, the people I see around town, the people I meet in this Cathedral, I might have said that the percentage of people with a college degree or better was 70%, 80%, perhaps even 90%. The fact that I was so wrong makes me realize that I am living in a bubble and that bubble may well blind me to the truth about many people’s lives.
As we all know, over the past 75 years our country has gone from a manufacturing economy to an information economy. We make far fewer things than we used to, and we reward those who know how to harness and use information, who know how to generate ideas. As David Brooks wrote in a recent piece for the New York Times, “Economically, this shift from manufacturing to ideas made total sense . . . But sociologically, politically and culturally, this shift from brawn to brains has contributed to the vast chasms we see in our country today. Places where highly educated information-age denizens gather are gleaming, while many other places are desolate. The people who have the kinds of abilities that make for school success are thriving; people with other kinds of abilities are not. . . To create a just society, we need to build a society that rewards a diversity of skills. I know how to process information . . . I’m terrible at working with my hands . . . We have to find more ways to reward the abilities that don’t involve information analysis on a laptop.”2
When I discovered how wrong I was about those college statistics, I realized that I really know nothing about the anger, frustration, and disappointment large numbers of people must feel who have been forced to move from a manufacturing economy to an information economy. People who lost their jobs after years of hard work forging steel, mining coal, or building automobiles and being told that they ought to go and learn computers. I realized how blind we can be to the reality of other people’s lives, and we need to be healed of that blindness.
Power or healing, what should we ask for, what should we work for?
In the wake of this election, regardless of who wins, I think our primary calling as Christians is to be people who work for healing and not for power. We are to be people who ask Jesus to heal our own blind spots so that we can better understand our brothers and sisters. We are to be people who strive to push back the fear and lift up hope. People who are less anxious and more confident that God is sovereign, people who realize that God’s purposes don’t ultimately rest on our efforts. James and John wanted power for themselves. Jesus let them know that any power they might acquire would only come from serving others. Bartimeaus asked for healing and so should we, healing for ourselves and healing for our nation.
It won’t be easy to do this kind of work. It requires strength and humility at the same time. It means being strong enough to speak the truth, strong enough to hold onto timeless principles, strong enough to never trade one’s integrity for access to power. But it also requires a humility to know that we don’t hold all the truth, that we are ourselves blind to many things and in need of healing. It requires us to be humble enough to know that we are as frail and as fallible as our worst enemy and that the people we oppose are no less God’s children than we are.
“What do you want me to do for you,” Jesus asks. How we answer that question says everything about what we value and what kind of people we want to be in the world. Amen.
1 Peter Wehner, “How Christianity Can Be a Healing Force in American Society,” September 19, 2024, Woodberry Forest School.
2 David Brooks, “A Recipe for a Striving American,” New York Times, 10/4/24