Mark 10:46–52
Jesus’ response to Bartimaeus in this story, although at first glance not about criminal justice, offers lessons for transformative and creative responses to harm.
Bartimaeus calls out for Jesus seeking mercy and liberation — seeking the new and abundant life promised by Jesus. His call to Jesus as the “son of David” is a recognition of Jesus’ messianic status (at a moment when Jesus is about to enter Jerusalem in triumph and resistance against the powers of oppression). Perhaps his call for mercy, in this context, is not only a desire for personal healing but also a prayer for communal liberation.
The promise of transformative justice is that personal healing after harm occurs in the context of communal liberation. The healing of structures — including ableist structures that stigmatize disability — can be as important as physical or psychological healing.
But what strikes me as most essential in this story is Jesus’ response after the disciples bring Bartimaeus to him: “What do you want me to do for you?”
One of the central differences between the responses of the criminal legal system and restorative/transformative responses to harm is that restorative and transformative justice responses are survivor-centered. The key question that an RJ process starts with — what are the needs of the person who was harmed? — reflects Jesus’ question to Bartimaeus: “What do you want me to do for you?”
The criminal legal system, by contrast, assumes the answer to every harm is punishment and exclusion. It ignores survivors who do not want harsh punishment, and can treat them with hostility and even retraumatize them. This is one reason, among many, that 70% of survivors of sexual assault choose not to report it to the police. Retributive state systems cannot meet the needs of those who have been harmed when they do not exist to ask: “What do you want me to do for you?”
“What do you want me to do for you?” What would bring you healing and liberation? What would make you feel that you had received restitution or reparations for the harm done to you? The answer may be different in every situation, which is one reason why there is not one alternative to the prison-industrial complex. Abolition means building on the variety of needs that those who have been harmed (which is all of us!) have, and building a variety of solutions to meet the needs of people by transforming relational and systemic structures.
“What do you want me to do for you?” is an essential question to ask when searching for ways to help those who are poor or unhoused as well — it is the basis of mutual aid. The criminalization of poverty, homelessness, and survival arise from systems that insist on top-down, controlling solutions to social problems; that see those who are in need of care as somehow unable to exercise agency and make their own decisions. When care comes with agency — as it does in this story — it brings not only physical healing, but liberation. Perhaps in the space for Bartimaeus’ agency that Jesus holds, we see foreshadowing of the systemic change to a liberated world of mutuality that Bartimaeus imagines when he calls Jesus “son of David.”
Of course, some survivors of harm do desire vengeance. “What do you want me to do for you?” can never be the only question driving our communal responses to harm. Yet what Jesus models here — a true relational listening to someone in need, making the space of healing a space for exercising agency — is an illustration and a goal of where transformative responses to violence, harm, and need can begin.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.