Sayings of Jesus: ‘What do you want me to do for you?’
The synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) include two stories in which Jesus asks someone this question: “What do you want me to do for you?” The first occasion involves two disciples, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, in Mark 10:36, when they have a request for Jesus: to sit on either side of him in his future kingdom. The story is paralleled in Matthew 20, except that here it’s their mother asking for them. Jesus answers that this is not something for him to grant, and he adds a warning against ‘lording it over people’ and ‘exercising authority’ over people—he says this characterises pagan gentile leaders, but it should not characterise his followers. A reminder, perhaps, for contemporary church leaders who seem very focused on their authority, status, and titles (as ‘prophets’ or ‘apostles’ or whatever).
We’ll take a closer look at the second occasion in a moment. But first, let’s think about an interesting statistic in the background. In his popular book, Jesus Is the Question, Martin Copenhaver identifies 307 questions asked by Jesus, and 183 questions asked of Jesus, of which only 3 were answered by Jesus! That’s including parallels (duplicated stories). Many popular evangelical sermons and writings quote these figures at face value, but I’ve not been able to verify them from scholarly sources. For sure, the precise numbers will depend on how ‘a question’ is defined, but the general principle is widely supported (for example, Conrad Gempf, in Jesus Asked, who focuses on the Gospel of Mark), so we’ll run with them for our purposes.
The picture these statistics paint is astounding. We’re used to thinking of Jesus as being a dispenser of answers (and in a similar way, we claim that for the Bible; as US President Ronald Reagan famously said, ‘Within the covers of the Bible are the answers for all the problems people face’). And yet, Jesus himself seems to have made a habit of avoiding answering questions, often responding instead with a question of his own.
The number of times that Jesus asked people questions is rather astonishing. Given that omniscience is a characteristic of God (meaning knowing everything that can possibly be known), it would seem strange for Jesus, as the divine Son, to be asking questions to gain information that was otherwise unavailable to him. And yet, as Hebrews 2:17 tells us, Jesus had to be made like us, fully human in every way, which includes not having access to information that his contemporaries didn’t have and couldn’t have. Admittedly, he had the closest possible relationship to the Holy Spirit, and yet, we must qualify that as the closest that a human can have.
For Jesus to be made like us in every way (apart from sin, Hebrews 4:15) meant ‘emptying himself’ of the divine characteristic of omniscience—Philippians 2:7—along with the other ‘omnis’. In becoming human, Jesus voluntarily laid down every aspect of divinity that would have been incompatible with full humanity—anything that would have given him an unfair advantage in living life as we have to. This was necessary in order for Jesus to fully redeem humanity from fully within humanity.
That said, Jesus’ purposes in asking questions are not exclusively to acquire information. The second occasion on which Jesus asks our captioned question illustrates this. Here’s the passage, in Luke 18:35–43:
As Jesus approached Jericho, a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging. When he heard the crowd going by, he asked what was happening. They told him, ‘Jesus of Nazareth is passing by.’
He called out, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!’
Those who led the way rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’
Jesus stopped and ordered the man to be brought to him. When he came near, Jesus asked him, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’
‘Lord, I want to see,’ he replied.
Jesus said to him, ‘Receive your sight; your faith has healed you.’ Immediately, he received his sight and followed Jesus, praising God. When all the people saw it, they also praised God.
(Matthew’s account differs from Luke’s and Mark’s insofar as two blind men are featured. In Mark’s account, the man is named Bartimaeus. Otherwise, they are substantively the same.)
When Jesus asks him, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ we could perhaps be forgiven for thinking, ‘Surely that’s stark-staring obvious, Jesus? The man obviously wants to be healed.’ We might have wondered whether, perhaps, Jesus couldn’t see the blind man through the crowd, but hearing him cry out, Jesus stops and asks for the man to be brought to him. Jesus asks the question only when the man comes near. Hence, what he wanted from Jesus—to be able to see—would, indeed, have been ‘obvious’ to him at this point. Clearly, acquiring information was not Jesus’ objective in asking. So what might that have been?
Gempf concludes that ‘Jesus wants to know where we stand. He doesn't need to know more facts; he wants to know us.’ I think that’s right, but we can develop it a little further. In Matthew 6:8, Jesus says, ‘Your Father knows what you need before you ask him’. But despite that, he immediately goes on to teach the disciples the prayer model that we call ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. If God already knows our needs before we ask him—as Jesus seems clearly to have known the blind man’s need—why ask? The answer, as Gempf hints at here, is . . . relationship.
Prayer—and prayer requests—are relational, not transactional. Prayer ‘models’ are not—and should not be put forward as—ways to increase the odds of getting what we want from God. I’m afraid that too much popular Christian thinking on prayer implies that. It’s perfectly understandable, of course, and especially where people are desperate. But we must resist turning God into some version of a divine vending machine: Press the right buttons in the right order and the answer we want will pop out.
Nor is having a sufficiently high quantity of something called ‘faith’ the secret to unlocking answers. Faith is not about mental certainty or mental discipline to dispel ‘negative thoughts’ in order not to jeopardise an otherwise available outcome. Again, these are mechanistic ways of thinking, worthy of a mechanistic God (but not of a personal and relational God). Perhaps it’s the fact we live in an age of science that causes us to default towards that cause-and-effect thinking.
Speaking of faith, you’ll have noticed that Jesus does say, ‘Your faith has healed you’. What might Jesus have meant by that, in this context? I suggest he didn’t mean some cosmic power called ‘faith’ built into the fabric of the universe that the man had tapped into—it was the power of God that healed him.
For me, the ‘faith’ that the man is being credited with here reflects two things: One, we need only the teensiest, weeniest amount to approach God relationally (the smallest amount measurable—and hence, available to everyone—pictured in the mustard seed; Matthew 17:20, etc.). Two, what we are seeing is faith defined as eager expectancy—a belief that Jesus could do this for him. Despite those urging the man to ‘be quiet’ (to give up asking), he appealed to Jesus all the more. Again, we should read this as relational, not transactional.
We will never recognise an answered prayer request if we never make a prayer request; any favourable outcome will be credited as unexplained, a mystery, or some version of natural causes. This is not to say that, when we do make a prayer request, we are guaranteed an answer (certainly, a favourable answer—to blithely say that God answers every prayer, but sometimes the answer is ‘no’, or ‘not yet’, is meant well but a bit of a cop-out). We never see Jesus in the Gospels refusing a legitimate request (the request of the sons of Zebedee was illegitimate), but then again, we must remember that Jesus did not heal every sick person in Israel, still less every sick person on earth at the time. The same is true of the Holy Spirit’s activities in the early church. Hard though this may be to make sense of, and still less to construct a systematic theology of divine healing from, the healings (then and now) are signs of the kingdom—signposting it—not the fullness of the kingdom, which is to come (Revelation 21:4–5).
Picture: Eustache Le Sueur, circa 1652-1655, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.