Thursday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time
Mark 10:46-52

“What do you want me to do for you?”

In the midst of your prayers to Him, or before Him in the Most Blessed Sacrament or during Holy Mass, have you ever heard Jesus ask this question to you?  “What do you want me to do for you?”  If He were to ask this question, most of us wouldn’t know how to respond.

Is this question that Jesus asks to the blind man simply a rhetorical question?  After all, in His divine nature, Jesus knows both what the blind man wants, as well as what the blind man needs.  The deeper question, however, is whether the blind man knows what he needs.

The same is true of each of us.  Most of us spend a majority of our prayer time petitioning God for what we want, or what we believe we need.  However, sometimes what we believe we need is different than what we truly need.

Was the recovery of his sight the blind man’s most important need?  Of course it was not.  But the blind man knows this, as does the evangelist, who ends this passage not by describing the man’s recovery of his sight, but by pointing out that he “followed [Jesus] on the way.”  The blind man subjected the recovery of his sight to a greater need:  the need to follow Jesus on the way.