I was reading Mark 8, 9 and 10 this morning and what I noticed was how much of it is Jesus asking things.
Who do people say I am. Who do you say I am. What were you arguing about on the road. What did Moses command you. Why do you call me good. Can you drink the cup I am going to drink. And twice, fifteen verses apart, what do you want me to do for you.
He asks the disciples. He asks a rich man who comes running up to him. He asks a blind man sitting beside the road outside Jericho who has been shouting at him. And he asks the Pharisees, which is the one I find hardest to account for. They have come to test him on divorce. They already know what they think and they are not there to learn anything. He could have answered them flat, and instead he asks them what Moses commanded, and hands the whole thing back. They end up telling him the answer.
Somebody wrote all of this down. Mark could have kept the teaching and let the questions go, and mostly that is what happens — we remember what Jesus said. But the questions are here, one after another, as though the asking was the thing that happened and not just the way into it.
The two at the end are worth putting side by side. James and John come privately and ask for the two places either side of him in his glory. They have just heard him say, for the third time, that he is going to be handed over and killed, and they ask anyway. He does not tell them off. He tells them they do not know what they are asking, and he does not tell them what they should have asked for instead.
Then Bartimaeus, a few verses later, gets the same question and asks to see. Nothing else. Not to come along, not what happens next. His eyes. He was sitting by the side of the road when he started shouting. When he could see, he got up and walked along that road behind Jesus.
Ask me what Jesus taught and I can tell you. Love your enemies. The last will be first. I have heard those preached, I have preached them myself, and I could have written them out for you as a young man.
Ask me what Jesus asked people and I would have to stop and think. I have been reading these chapters most of my life and until this morning I had not counted the questions. They were in front of me the whole time. I had been reading past them to get to what he said next, because what he said next was the part I thought I was there for.
We had been in Tasmania a few months. A friend came down from Adelaide, someone I would turn to when there was funding to be found, and the two of us put together three projects for the church to run in the community. We based them on what other churches were doing. Then we went to see the manager of the local neighbourhood centre.
I took her through them one at a time. She said no to the first one. She said no to the second one. The last one was a breakfast program in the school, and she said no to that too, and gave me the reason. They already ran one. If the church got involved, the people who had been volunteering would stop.
Then she paused and said there was a way I could help. I asked what it was.
Would you come to the breakfasts and just sit with the kids while they eat?
I nearly walked out of that room with the no.