Scripture: Matthew 20:29-34, John 5:1-9
Many years ago, when Lisa and I first visited the Leelanau peninsula, I encountered a traffic sign that I’d never before seen in more than half-a-century of driving. It happened one bright summer afternoon, when our explorations of the area took us down a long and nicely paved road to a lovely Lake Michigan beach. When we came to the end of the road, we found ourselves staring at a yellow caution sign that read: “County Road Ends at Water.”
I wondered who, exactly, needed to be informed that the road did not extend into the lake. I imagined a world without such a sign, where two tourists unexpectedly found themselves submerged in twenty feet of water because no one had told them to stop where the lake started. So, there they were, puttering along the floor of Lake Michigan in a 1987 Chevy Suburban with a “Go Buckeyes” bumper sticker on the back.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
Sometimes the obvious comes to us as a statement, like “County Road Ends at Water.” Sometimes it comes to us as a question. This can include a question to which the answer is obvious. Or it can include a question as to which it is obvious we don’t know the answer.
That last category reminds me of an incident that took place at an Ann Arbor church I attended back in the 1980s and 1990s. The associate pastor, a friend of mine named Tom, arrived at church one mid-December Sunday morning to discover that someone had stolen the figure of the baby Jesus from the life-sized creche scene on the front lawn. He called the police, who stopped by later in the day after services.
One of the officers, trying to be helpful but not thinking things through, asked: “Do you have any idea where we should look for the baby Jesus.” Tom thought for a moment and replied: “Well, I suppose you might try Egypt.” By the way, the story has a happy ending: A member of the church spotted the figure a few weeks later at a garage sale and the baby Jesus returned home without incident.
Our scripture readings for this morning include two of the best known and most beloved healing stories in the gospels. In one, Jesus restores the sight of two blind men. In the other, he empowers a man, who has for thirty-eight years laid in desperate immobility beside a pool, to stand and walk again. They are stories of tremendous power and drama, especially if we put aside our familiarity with them and try to hear them anew.
And yet both stories include an element that might strike us as curious. In each of them, Jesus asks a question. Now, there’s nothing unusual about that—in the Bible, Jesus asks more than three-hundred questions. Asking questions is the rabbinical way.
But thesequestions are unusual. These questions seem to invite an obvious answer. Translations vary, but he asks the blind men something like: “What do you need?” or “What do you want me to do for you?” And he asks the lame man something like: “Do you want to be made well?” or “How can I help you?” Surely, the answers to all of these questions are as plain as day. So, why then does Jesus pose them?
That’s the puzzle I want to explore with you this morning. And I believe that the answer to it may tell us a great deal about humility, about perspective, and about the complexity of the human heart. Indeed, I believe that the answer to the puzzle can help make us more compassionate and empathic followers of Jesus Christ, as we strive to reflect His presence in the world.
One way to think about the questions that Jesus asks is to understand them as invitations to these individuals to make a profession of faith. In this understanding, his questions ask them to search their hearts, to decide what they believe, and then to proclaim it. Once they verbally acknowledge that Jesus canrestore their sight or enable them to walk, then he willmake it so for them.
This may be the correct interpretation of the text, but I’m doubtful for three reasons. First, that reading makes Jesus’s love and compassion sound coldly transactional; yeah, you get X, but only if you say Y. It assigns to Jesus exactly the kind of rigid formalism that he challenged in the religious leaders of his time.
Second, throughout his ministry Jesus showed considerable skepticism about the value of what we say. He understood that saying can amount to nothing more than posturing and putting on a show. This is why in the sixth chapter of Matthew he tells us to pray in private. This is why in the seventh chapter of Matthew he says: “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Jesus is vastly more interested in what is in our hearts and in how the contents of our hearts translates into caring for the least among us. As you may recall, that quotation I just gave you from the seventh chapter of Matthew expresses only half of Jesus’s thought. He goes on to say: “only the one who doesthe will of my father [will enter the kingdom].” Jesus understood that talk is cheap and that true discipleship comes at a cost.
The third reason to reject the transactional reading of these stories is that it doesn’t explain what happens with the man at the pool. When Jesus asks him if he wants to be made well, the man doesn’t respond with a heartfelt expression of his faith in Christ; instead, he complains that other people keep cutting in front of him in line. Jesus heals him just the same.
So, if Jesus doesn’t start with a question because he wants a confession of belief, then what is he doing? Why ask these questions, to which the answers seem obvious? Many possibilities present themselves, but this morning I’ll offer just one. It’s the one that makes the most sense to me. Maybe I’ll get lucky and it will also make sense to you.
I think that in asking these questions Jesus was doing something he does from time to time: he was modeling; he was modeling a behavior; he was modelinga behavior that he wants us to follow whenever we engage with others—and especially whenever we engage with those in need. I think that he was demonstrating that the proper place to begin is always with a question. And we start with a question precisely because it’s dangerous for us to assume that the answer is obvious and we know what it is.
Now, to be clear, I believe that Jesus himself didknow what these individuals needed; indeed, he knew even better than they knew. Again, the man who couldn’t walk seemed to think he just needed help getting into the pool. Jesus effectively said: I’ll do you one better: stand and be on your way.
But Jesus can take that prerogative because he is Jesus and, to engage in a masterpiece of understatement, we are not. Like the county road at the lake, our ability to understand what another human being most needs ends where that other human being begins. Filled with good intentions, we can get things entirely wrong. So, we do best to start with questions. The Ted Lasso fans here this morning may hear an echo of his deeply wise admonition to us: “Be curious, not judgmental.”
Recognizing how little we really know about the inner workings of the people around us is an essential component of humility. Perhaps nothing is as prideful and dangerous as assuming that we know what lies within the deep heart of someone else. Asking helps to keep us in our place and shows respect for the dignity and autonomy of the other.
It does something else as well: It embraces the profound mystery that is each human life. Asking invites the other person into a dialogue. And that’s critical because sometimes even the person with whom we’re engaging harbors some uncertainty about exactly what they want and need.
The great religious essayist Brian Doyle wrote a beautiful piece called Joyas Voladoras, which means “flying jewels,” the name that the early Spanish explorers in the Americas assigned to hummingbirds. In the piece, Doyle writes about the magnificent variety of hearts that we find in nature, from hummingbirds (whose hearts beat ten times per second) to great blue whales (whose hearts weigh more than seven tons). He concludes by thinking out loud about that especially complicated mechanism called the human heart.
Doyle invites us to ponder how hard we work to wall off our hearts, and how little it takes to tear down those walls. He writes:
“So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each other but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must … [A]ll hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and [our] will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.”
So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So many ways to break it. So many ways to heal it. So many questions. “What do you want?” “What do you need?”
Our true needs can surprise us because we bring such a narrow and fuzzy perspective to life. And moments of breadth and clarity of insight can come from the strangest and most unexpected places. Joy from grief; comfort from loss; light from dark.
Years ago, a friend of mine suffered through a serious illness that led to the loss of many things that she loved. We had a long conversation about it once, and she described to me all the truths that she had learned about herself and about life as a result of her illness. I asked her: “So, if you could replay your life, and not go through this illness, but also lose everything that you’ve learned and that you’ve become as a result of it, would you do that?” She smiled, and shook her head, and immediately answered: “No.”
Moments of breadth and clarity of insight. From the strangest and most unexpected places. Joy from grief; comfort from loss; light from dark.
Laura Gilpin wrote a magnificent and heartbreaking short poem on this theme. It’s about a natural oddity, a calf born with two heads. The calf will live for only one night, and then pass, and then be taken to a museum for study. The poem starts us there, in that seemingly sad, unredeemable, and dark place.
Here, though, is how the poem ends:
“But tonight he is alive and in the north
Field with his mother. It’s a perfect
Summer evening, the moon rising over
The orchard, the wind in the grass. And
As he stares into the sky, there are
Twice as many stars as usual.”
This, too, is why we begin with questions, to seek out the perspective of the other. Because in the places where we experience only isolation and see only sadness, someone else may experience a mother’s comfort and see twice as many stars.
The sun beat down on the road outside of Jericho. The blind men had stationed themselves so they could call out to Jesus as he passed. A large crowd emerged from the city, loud, boisterous, people jockeying for position to get near Jesus. Amidst all the noise the men could barely hear themselves think.
Not knowing exactly where Jesus was, they called out into the darkness. Over and over again. And then the crowd rewarded them for their efforts by telling them to be quiet. So much of their life like this—ignored, silenced, pushed off to the margin.
And then two sounds. First, the sound of someone approaching, of someone turning from the crowd, of someone walking toward them. And then the sound of a voice—soft, kind, compassionate but strong, directed at them as if they were the only people in God’s whole wide world.
And from the voice came not an order, not a command, not a dismissive remark, not a directive to stay quiet, but questions. Of all things, questions. “What do you need? What do you want me to do for you? How can I help?”
The questions he put to them are the questions he puts to us. And they are the questions he invites us to put to all of our brothers and sisters. They are the questions we ask in our humility, in our openness, and in our service of the Lord.
What do you need?
What do you want me to do for you?
How can I help?
This, too, is the prayer that Jesus taught us.
And the people said: Amen.
Pastoral Prayer:
Good and gracious Lord
We come to the world like filled vessels;
Filled with our perspectives and our presumptions.
Filled with our predispositions and our prejudices.
Filled with our cares and our convictions.
Filled with our sensibilities and our certainties.
Empty us of ourselves that we might fill our hearts with You.
Open us to the infinite possibilities of your world
And of the hearts of your diverse and different children.
Open us to the possibilities that come only
With our own embrace of humility.
Open us to the possibility that we do best to start with questions
So that we might better hear and understand
The needs of our sisters and brothers,
The needs of the least in the kingdom,
The needs of the hopeful and hopeless,
The needs of a world that cries for your grace,
For your renewal, for your salvation,
For your presence, for your Love.