Sermon preached at Evensong on the Fifth Sunday after Trinity 2026

‘What do you want me to do for you?’

In folk tales from around the world, this question pops up as a genie or a wizard in disguise offers to grant a wish. Sometimes the question is a reward for something good the person did; sometimes it is a moral test to unmask their true character.

Either way, things don't always go well when people get what they want or think they want.

Just think back to the Greek myth of King Midas, who is granted his wish that everything he touches will turn to gold until he finds he cannot eat real food and then he turns his own daughter into a lifeless golden statue.

‘What do you want me to do for you?’

This question also reminds us of the modern technology we carry in our hands in which chatbots & algorithms seek to please us, promising endless help in pursuing our desires. While these can be useful tools for particular purposes, we all know how easily we can find ourselves scrolling and searching and clicking, chasing whatever the next thing promises to give us, but rarely finding ourselves satisfied for long.

‘What do you want me to do for you?’

We may be surprised to realise that this is also a key question Jesus asks people in the Gospels, including the blind man on the side of the road in Jericho in today's lesson from Luke.

Jesus's question is not designed to be a trap but rather an invitation to identify and name what a person needs and wants and then to go deeper. People often want something from Jesus but can’t always name it until he draws it out from them and redirects those desires towards God.

Jesus invites the blind man in Luke - who is known as Bartimaeus in the other Gospels - he invites Bartimaeus to tell him what he wants him to do. Bartimaeus is a social outcast, desperate enough to be begging at the side of a busy street in the notoriously violent city of Jericho. But while he cannot see, he does have a voice and he uses it. He yells loud enough to get Jesus' attention: ‘Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me!’ He knows who Jesus is and he knows at least in a vague way what he needs from him – to be heard, to be healed, to be restored to connection and relationship.

The crowd, annoyed by his noise, tells him sternly to shut up - who is this social nobody to bother a great man like Jesus of Nazareth?

Bartimaeus is bold enough to throw himself before the throne of grace anyway. He shouts all the louder. And so Jesus stops in his tracks, turns, and tells the others to bring this man to him. Among all the commotion, he hears that one man's plea and he really sees him. And then comes that piercing question: ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ Mercy is vague. Jesus doesn't want to assume he knows what Bartimaeus needs; he asks him to name his need, he takes him seriously as a partner in the encounter.

Isn’t it amazing when someone stops and asks you what you truly want? When someone puts away distractions and gives you their full undivided attention, offers help and rolls up their sleeves?

Bartimaeus not only has his sight restored, but also his dignity as a child of God. He is so changed by this brief encounter, that he becomes a follower, a disciple, of Jesus.

Something similar happens for Zacchaeus. Unlike Bartimaeus, he is a rich and powerful tax collector, someone whose wealth likely comes from extortion and embezzlement. Tax collectors were despised as collaborators who profited from Rome's occupation.

Yet this man has clearly been thinking more deeply about his life and his priorities. He is burning with curiosity to see the teacher, preacher and healer Jesus of Nazareth. He is so keen to see him that he does something deeply undignified for a man of his social standing by climbing a tree and leaning over. Jesus spots him, he seems to know who he is, and he invites himself to dinner, to the shock and envy of Zacchaeus's neighbours who resent him and see him as unclean and unworthy.

Zacchaeus is so undone by this honour that he commits right then to giving away half of his possessions to the poor and paying extravagant reparations to anyone he has cheated in the past. He wants to do things differently from now on. Interestingly, he doesn't ask anything of Jesus but instead shows Jesus that he is eager to change and he wishes to serve. Jesus recognises the depth of the change and declares that Zacchaeus has been restored once again to his true status as 'a son of Abraham.' The lonely accumulation of money and power will no longer be all he has; he is restored to a world where he belongs and where he can give back.

‘What is it that you want me to do for you?’

What a question! How would you answer? Do you know what you need or want for God to do for you? If you look at your life, is it obvious?

Sometimes we don’t know what we want. We can be a bundle of contradictions and confusion, whose priorities and actions don’t align. Intelligent, creative and cooperative, yet also wounded, fearful, competitive. We constantly end up wanting things to fill the wounded place inside. ‘What a piece of work is man!’ Shakespeare's Hamlet declared, exasperated. We may also be exasperated with ourselves sometimes, too, when we can’t seem to make our actions align with our beliefs, when we get caught up in so many distractions.

Centuries before screens existed, French philosopher Blaise Pascal named our habit of distracting ourselves to avoid facing what is real and important as divertissement. Pascal believed there is a kind of abyss in each of us that only God can fill. When we don’t receive what we need, we fill the void with substitute things instead, like money, endless praise, or the promise of the next notification to distract us from our problems. But everything we throw into the abyss simply falls through.

We might assume this means humans are simply insatiable and want too much, but perhaps in fact we settle for too little. We settle for things that cannot ultimately satisfy us. C.S. Lewis, whose memorial is in Poet’s Corner, once wrote in a 1942 sermon that we don’t grasp the enormity of what God is offering us. “Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies … because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Bartimaeus asked for his sight, and was given that plus a new vocation. Zacchaeus asked for nothing but received the gift of Jesus’s presence and gave away half of what he owned. Both of them had their imaginations, their hearts and their lives transformed through a simple encounter with Jesus.

Perhaps that is the real answer to the question. Jesus asks what we want him to do for us, not so that we might simply receive, but so that, like Bartimaeus, we might be changed. That we might learn to follow and to give. So that one day, when Jesus asks us, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ may our answer, in time, become his own question but turned back to him:  Lord, what do you want me to do for you?