What do you want me to do for you?

Neil Petersen

Agony in the Garden, Andrea Mantegna

What do you want me to do for you?

 This is the question Jesus asks the two blind men who address him with the words: Lord, have mercy on us (Matthew 20:29).

This Lent I will try to hear more clearly Jesus asking that question of me. This Gospel passage records two blind men making the appeal to Jesus. Our journey of discerning God’s openness to us is something we do corporately as well as in the intimacy of our own prayer. The centrality of the personal encounter, however, is the common theme of the transforming events in the Gospels: we may think of the unfolding insight through question and answer in the exchange with the Samarian woman at the well, the compassion in curing the leper, the encouragement given to the lame man to regain the confidence of mobility through the invitation to stand up. Putting ourselves in the position of those supplicants we can begin to experience the freedom that the encounter brings.   

So let us return to the blind men. Jesus touched them and they regained their sight: they had not always been blind, but were able to see again by his healing touch. Perhaps our own spiritual sight has been dimmed by the immediate pressures of recent times: anxiety, deprivation, physical and mental abuse, worry - all arising more acutely due to the pandemic. May we by grace bring these burdens to Jesus and seek forgiveness for thinking first of self, and not of others. Jesus had compassion for all in their suffering, and gained salvation for us by his own sufferings. In answer to his question, I will seek the grace to grow into his compassionate mind, and to respond in love to others as he did, whatever their need and wherever they are.

From the Gospels we know Jesus wrestled with issues of the moment and what God’s will might be in response to them. The events leading to his Passion brought that struggle to a climax at Gethsemane. This Lent we may be helped by a visual image of Jesus confronting the approaching reality: Mantegna’s painting Agony in the Garden in the National Gallery shows Jesus at prayer, seeking the will of the Father in the face of looming suffering. 

He was facing something brutal, humiliating and deadly however much the artist may have tried to soften the depiction of that coming suffering by including angelic beings supporting its representative symbols. It challenged faith to the utmost.

So in response to the question, my unworthy reply is: Jesus, have mercy on me in my doubt and struggles, and by grace enable me with the Psalmist to say at the end of this penitential season: You have turned my mourning into dancing; you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.  O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you for ever (Ps 30:11-12).