What Do You Want Me to Do for You?

Two brothers came up to him on the road and asked for a yes before they would say what it was for.

Teacher, we want You to do for us whatever we ask.

They were on the way up to Jerusalem. He was walking out in front, and he had just taken the Twelve aside and told them, for the third time and in more detail than ever, what was waiting at the top of that road. Handed over. Condemned. Mocked, spit on, flogged, killed. Rising after three days.

Mark puts the brothers in the very next sentence. He had just told them he was going to die, and they came to him with a blank check.

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Their names were James and John, the sons of Zebedee. Mark first shows them years earlier, sitting in a boat mending nets. When Jesus called, they went at once. They left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed Him. A father, a crew, a trade they'd likely known since they were old enough to stand on a deck. They walked away from all of it on one afternoon.

Peter said it out loud a few verses before this, on behalf of all of them. Look, we have left everything and followed You.

Jesus didn't wave that away. He told Peter that nobody who had left home or family or fields for his sake would go without, that they'd receive it back a hundred times over, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children, along with persecutions. Then he added a sentence that turns every ranking upside down. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first. It was still hanging in the air when the brothers came asking to be first.

So when the brothers came asking, they weren't asking from nothing. They had given years. Most people who have given years to something believe, somewhere underneath, that the years have earned them a word at the end.

He didn't sign the blank check. He asked them a question instead.

What do you want Me to do for you?

They had the answer ready. Grant that one of us may sit at Your right hand and the other at Your left in Your glory.

Two seats, one on each side of him. A place, a position, a title that would last. Matthew tells the same scene with their mother kneeling in front of him and making the request for them, which may be the most ordinary moment in the whole Gospel. A parent spending her one ask on her children.

He didn't send them away for it. You do not know what you are asking, he said, and he asked whether they could drink the cup he was going to drink. We can, they said, the way people say it before they know. He told them they would. The seats, he said, weren't his to hand out.

The other ten heard about it and were angry. So he called all twelve together and talked about rulers who lord it over people. But it shall not be this way among you. Whoever wanted to be great would serve.

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Then they came to Jericho, and on the way out of town there was a man sitting beside the road.

Bartimaeus was blind and he begged for a living, and when he heard who was passing he started shouting. People told him to be quiet. He shouted louder. Jesus stopped the whole procession and had him called over, and the man threw off his cloak and came.

Then Jesus asked him the same question he had asked the brothers.

What do you want Me to do for you?

It's the identical sentence, a few verses apart, on the same road, in the same week. Two answers.

The brothers asked for seats. The blind man asked for something that had nothing to do with where he would sit or what he would be called.

Rabboni, said the blind man, let me see again.

The brothers had started with Teacher and gone straight to the seating chart. He started with Rabboni, a fuller form of the same word, the one a grieving woman would use outside an empty tomb a few days later. Then he asked for the one thing he'd been missing his whole life.

That was all. He didn't ask for a position near the front. He didn't ask to be useful, or to be given something to run. He asked to see. And he got it on the spot, and Mark says he followed Jesus along the road, the road that went up to Jerusalem.

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Mark answers the brothers' request himself before the week is out, and he doesn't comment on it. He just reports who ended up on either side.

Along with Jesus, they crucified two robbers, one on His right and one on His left.

Those were the places James and John had asked for. Right hand and left. He had told them they didn't know what they were asking, and on that hill nobody needed it explained anymore.

The record keeps going past that. James did drink the cup. When the story of the first churches was written down, his death took a single sentence. He had James, the brother of John, put to death with the sword. He is the first of the Twelve whose death for following Jesus the New Testament records. He never got the seat. He got years of walking behind the one he'd asked it from, and then he got the cup he had said, so quickly, that he could drink.

Nothing in the story says the brothers were wrong to ask. They were asked, and they answered honestly with the thing they wanted. It just turned out that what they wanted was a role, and the role they pictured did not exist.

The same question came twice in one week, to men who had given everything and to a man who had nothing to give. It was never a test of what anyone had earned. And when the role is gone, the question is still being asked, and the most honest answer is usually not another role.

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Where this meets your week

The blank check. People who held a role for a long time often learn to answer with whatever works. Wherever the family wants to eat. Whatever the board decides. Whatever the patient needs this week. It's generous, and after enough years it becomes the only answer some people know how to give. James and John tried the blank-check version of a request, and he wouldn't take it. He made them name the thing.

Practice on something small, because the small ones are where the habit lives. This week, three times, when someone asks what you want, give a real answer with a noun in it. Where do you want to eat? "The Mexican place on Fifth, around six." What do you want to do Saturday? "Drive out to the lake and walk the long trail." If the old reflex comes out first, "Oh, whatever you want," stop and correct yourself out loud: "Actually, I'd like the lake." It will feel strange. That's the point of practicing it where nothing much is riding on it.

The ask spent on someone else. Their mother knelt and used her request on her sons. Parents do this, and caregivers, and anyone who was responsible for other people long enough. When the people you spent it on are grown or gone or settled, the habit stays.

Take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left, write the last five things you asked for, from God or from anyone. On the right, write who each one was really for. If every line on the right has someone else's name on it, start a second sheet with one heading: For me. Write one thing under it. Not for the kids, not for a spouse, not for the people who used to report to you. If nothing comes, leave the page on the counter and try again tomorrow morning. Some people need three or four mornings before anything shows up.

The next seat. After a role ends, the first offers that come are usually more roles. A board, an advisory title, a committee that could use your experience. None of those are wrong, and the brothers weren't punished for wanting a place. But a seat was what they asked for because a seat was what they could picture.

When the next offer comes, don't answer on the phone. Say, "Let me sit with that for a week." Then write the question across the top of a sheet of paper and answer it with no title allowed in the answer. If what you wrote is "to teach young people the trade," ask whether the board seat actually does that, or just sits near it. If the seat does it, take the seat. If it doesn't, you've learned what to look for instead.

The plain one. Some people have wanted the same simple thing for years and never said it, because it sounded too small to say. To sleep through the night. To walk without the knee. To see a grandchild more than twice a year. To hear from a brother. Bartimaeus asked for the plainest thing a blind man could ask for, and the question had been put to him exactly so he could say it.

Say yours to one person this week, in one sentence, without explaining it. Something like: "I want to see the grandkids every month, not every holiday." Then stop talking. The explaining is what usually shrinks it.

Doing it with someone else. This question works well across a table. Two people who've shared a house for decades often know each other's preferences and have no idea what the other one actually wants. Pick a quiet evening. Each of you writes one sentence answering What do you want? without talking first, then fold the papers and trade. Read them. Ask one question about the other person's sentence, and only one: "What would that look like on a Tuesday?" Don't fix it, and don't debate whether it's realistic. A small group of friends can do the same thing over coffee, going around the table once.

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Answer the question out loud.

Tonight is best, before the day's noise settles over it. Go somewhere you can be alone for ten minutes: the car in the driveway, the back porch, the kitchen after everyone's gone to bed. Ask it the way it was asked on that road: What do you want Me to do for you? Then answer in one sentence. Two rules. No one else's name in it, and no title in it.

It may come out smaller than you expected. It may come out larger. It may surprise you to hear it in your own voice. Let it stand. Write it down afterward, word for word, and put the date on it.

If nothing comes, sit the full ten minutes anyway and try again tomorrow night. If what comes out embarrasses you, it's probably the true one. If it's so big it frightens you, say it anyway and leave the size alone for now. You don't have to do anything about it tonight. The brothers and the blind man both got to say theirs before anything happened.

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Two men on that road asked to sit, one on each side of him.

One man had been sitting beside the road for longer than anyone wrote down. He asked to see. The last thing Mark tells you about him is that he was walking.