“What do you want me to do for you?”
That’s an incredibly probing question. How I answer that, I know, reveals a great deal about me. It reveals my treasure, my trust, and also exposes places in which I’m broken. To really wrestle with that question is to risk opening your heart up for longing.
I hate it that this scares me so much. My reticence to really deal with this question is telling. For me, it is not so much that I am afraid my desires are contrary to his kingdom. It’s not as if I could pull out of my pocket a list of desires that I’d really like but I’m too afraid to ask for because they aren’t spiritual enough. In reality, I can’t pull a piece of paper out of my pocket because it’s too tattered and filled with deep disappointments and the ink has now dried up on my pen. I feel, at times, like I’ve lost the drive to write a new list.
“What do you want me to do for you?” feels like it touches a part of my soul that needs reawakened. I thought of this question when I read a brief devotional by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
A Tortured Longing
In January of 1943 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer. Bonhoeffer was arrested in April of 1943 by the Gestapo. Though he was not yet married he certainly had his fiancée in mind when he wrote this to a friend:
“When a man enters on a supremely happy marriage and has thanked God for it, it is a terrible blow to discover that the same God who established the marriage now demands of us a period of such great deprivation.” (Bonhoeffer, 14)
Bonhoeffer would go on to say that “nothing tortures us more than longing”. In order to answer Jesus’ question you need to have longing. For James and John they had a twisted longing (self-glory) but they still had it. What does Jesus’ question do to somebody who has been broken and battered?
A question like Jesus’ puts a finger in the wound of unmet longing. It feels like a torturing question. “What do you want me to do for you” threatens to awaken desires we’ve long ago laid to rest.
I think Bonhoeffer is correct when he says,
“It’s not true to say that it is good for a man to have suffered heavy blows early and often in life; in most cases it breaks him. True, it hardens people for times like ours, but it also greatly helps to deaden them.” (14)
Bonhoeffer goes on to say that one of the strategies of a dead heart is to try to find a substitute. But it never works because “substitutes repel us”. The thing we are longing for cannot be replaced. And so “there is nothing worse in such times than to try to find a substitute for the irreplaceable.”
The Solution to Tortured Longing
Substitutes will never give us the strength needed. It will only make us more miserable and cut out the legs of our endurance in hardship. Instead Bonhoeffer, as Bonhoeffer said, we must “[look] the longing straight in the face”. (15) By acknowledging our longing and learning to lament and mourn and wait for Jesus will we find help and healing.
There was another man in that story of James and John requesting to sit at Jesus’ right hand (Mark 10:32-52). He was a beggar sitting by the roadside and when he heard that Jesus was coming he “began to cry out” and asked Jesus to give him mercy. The crowd tried to shut him up but he persisted.
Then Jesus asked him the same question that he asked of James and John.
What do you want me to do for you?
And his answer is so simple. “I’d like to see”. His list isn’t long. It’s pointed. Sight. That’s what he wants. Bartimaeus is “staring” longing in the face. He doesn’t want a substitute. He knows his longing and he brings it directly to the one who can help.
Conclusion
I find Jesus asking me that same question today, but I’m timid in my response. I don’t have the youthful ignorance of James and John. Nor do I seem to have the faith and desperation of Bartimaeus.
Am I scared to be that vulnerable again? Am I afraid that if I answer those questions I’ll be met by a frustrated longing? Am I addicted to substitutes? Am I worried that my answer might reveal that I’ve moved away from a Christ-centered longing? Or am I afraid that I still am longing for Christ and I don’t know what to do with those frustrated hopes?
I don’t know.
But I’m going to risk asking those questions. If Bart can see again, maybe I can hope again.
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