"But what about you?" he asked. "Who do you say I am?" Simon Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God."
Matthew 16:15-16 (NIV)There is a question Jesus asks in the Gospels that I think about more than almost any other. He is walking along, and a blind man named Bartimaeus starts shouting for Him from the side of the road. The crowd tries to hush him. He shouts louder. Jesus stops and says: bring him to Me.
And when Bartimaeus comes, Jesus asks him: "What do you want me to do for you?"
The man is obviously blind. The answer seems apparent. And Jesus still asks. He asks because He is not going to assume. He is not going to sweep in with the answer before the person has named what they actually need. He creates the space for Bartimaeus to say it out loud, to name the thing, to come before Jesus with his own specific request in his own words. "Rabbi, I want to see."
That question, "what do you want me to do for you," is one of the most respectful things one person can say to another. It refuses to assume. It honors the person's voice. It invites them into the interaction rather than doing it to them.
"When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, 'Do you want to get well?'"
John 5:6 (NIV)He asked more than He answered
Scholars who have counted the questions in the Gospels arrive at numbers between 307 and 340, depending on how you count them. He answered direct questions with questions more than a hundred times. When people tried to trap Him, He usually responded with a question that reframed the whole conversation.
When the Pharisees asked whether it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, He asked whose image was on the coin. When the chief priests demanded by what authority He acted, He asked them whether John's baptism was from heaven or from men. When Peter asked how many times he should forgive his brother, Jesus answered him, but the answer involved a story with a question built into it.
He used questions the way a skilled guide uses them: not to show He did not know the answer, but to help the person He was talking with find their own way into the truth. The question creates movement. It opens something. A lecture closes people down sometimes. A question draws them in.
The question that changed everything
He had just asked the disciples what the crowds were saying about Him. Various answers: John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets. And then He pivots. "But what about you?" What do you say? Not what have you heard. Not what is the official position. What do you actually believe?
This is a question that cannot be answered secondhand. It requires a personal position. It requires Peter to say something real rather than report what other people think. And Peter answers with the confession that everything else in the New Testament is built on: You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.
Jesus did not lead with that declaration. He drew it out of Peter with a question. Because a truth you arrive at through your own searching settles differently in you than a truth handed to you from the outside.
What He is still asking
I think Jesus is still a question-asker. Not because He does not know the answers, but because He is still committed to the same thing He was committed to in the Gospels: drawing people into their own encounter with truth rather than delivering conclusions to passive recipients.
When you are in prayer and something surfaces, a memory, a conviction, an awareness of something you have been avoiding, I think that is often Jesus working the same way He worked with the disciples. Not announcing. Asking. What is this? What do you actually want? Who do you say that I am in this particular situation?
The questions are not designed to make you uncomfortable for the sake of it. They are designed to get you somewhere. To open something that is closed. To help you arrive at a truth that will actually hold because you arrived at it honestly, not because someone handed it to you pre-packaged.
The question He asked the invalid at the pool
This one is striking in a different way. There is a man at the pool of Bethesda who has been ill for thirty-eight years. Jesus walks up to him, knows he has been there a long time, and asks: "Do you want to get well?" (John 5:6)
It sounds like an odd question. Of course he wants to get well. But Jesus asks it anyway. And the man's answer is revealing: he talks about how no one helps him get to the water in time. He does not actually answer the question. He describes the problem.
Jesus heals him anyway. But the question was doing something. "Do you want to get well?" is a question worth sitting with yourself. Sometimes people have been in their situation long enough that the condition has become identity, and the prospect of change, even healing, is complicated. Jesus does not assume He knows the answer. He asks.
What question do you sense Jesus asking you right now?
It might be one from today's reading, "What do you want me to do for you?" or "Who do you say I am?" or "Do you want to get well?" Sit with whichever one lands and see what comes up when you try to answer it honestly.
- Which question of Jesus caught me off guard?
- What do I want Jesus to do for me?
- Who do I say Jesus is?
- Am I in conversation with Him or just receiving information?
- Am I answering His questions honestly?
- Am I willing to be drawn into my own encounter with truth?
Jesus asked Bartimaeus, "What do you want me to do for you?" even though the man was obviously blind. He did not assume. He invited Bartimaeus to name his own need in his own words. What would you say if Jesus asked you that question right now?
"Jesus, I want to be in a conversation with You, not just receiving information about You. Ask me something today. I will try to answer honestly instead of deflecting. What do You want to know from me that I have not been saying? What question have You been waiting for me to sit with that I keep skipping past? I am here. I am listening. Ask. In Jesus Name, Amen."
He is still a question-asker because He wants to draw you into your own encounter with truth.
Tomorrow we are going to talk about the fact that He got tired. He slept through a storm. He sat down by a well because He needed to. His tiredness is not an embarrassing footnote. It is part of the good news.
With love and hope for your walk with Him, Claire