Ambition fuels human
behavior. Many events in people’s lives are motivated by ambition. A shopkeeper
strives to find new ways to display goods in the ambitious hope of being more
prosperous. A scientist pushes back the frontiers of knowledge because of a
love of knowledge. We all know students who burn the midnight oil. All are motivated by
ambition.
Ambition is the fuel for
many helpful human behaviors, but there is a dark side to ambition. How many
people have wrecked their lives because their ambitions were so great that they
sacrificed all other values on the altar of their ambitions? We have seen the
human wreckage left behind by people who abandoned, manipulated, or abused
their families by seeking their own ambitions. Ambition is a healthy motivator of
good behavior and good activities, but it also has a more demonic side.
Henri Nouwen was a
Catholic priest and academician. His academic pursuits took him to a teaching
post at Harvard, a great accomplishment for anyone in the academic arena. Yet
Nouwen reached a time in his life when he was not satisfied. He left his
comfortable teaching post at Harvard, teaching some of the most brilliant students
in the country, and became a worker at Daybreak, a home for adults who were
mentally disabled. After Nouwen had been at Daybreak for a time, he wrote:
Most of
my past life has been built around the idea that my value depends on what I do. . . . I
fought my way up to the lonely top of a little success, a little popularity,
and a little power. But now, as I sit beside the slow and heavy-breathing Adam
[a resident of Daybreak]I start seeing how violent that journey was, so filled with desires to be better than others, so marked by rivalry and competition, so pervaded with compulsion and obsessions, so spotted with moments of suspicion, jealousy, resentment, and revenge. (Quoted in Pulpit Resource, November 12, 1990)
The Bible is skeptical
about ambition. The book of James is a primer on practical Christianity. The
writer says “selfish ambition” is earthly, unspiritual, and devilish. Hardly a recommendation,
is it? James goes on to write that the primary results are disorder and
wickedness.
In a wonderful Chinese
folktale, a woman loses her only child in death. She goes to the holy man and asks
him to bring her child back to life. He replies, “Search for the home that has
never known sorrow, and, in that home, find the magic mustard seed and bring it
to me. Then we will have the power to bring your child back.” The woman’s first stop is
a great and luxurious palace. Thinking everything will be good and joyful
there, she knocks on the door saying she is looking for a place without sorrow.
“You have come to the wrong place,” they reply, and recount all the sorrows
that have come to that home of power and wealth. The woman says to herself,
“Who is better able to help these people than I who have had such misfortune of
my own?” She stays to comfort them, and later continues her search, which takes
her to the hovels and the palaces of China. In each place she becomes so
involved in ministering to other people’s grief that she forgets her own. In
her forgetfulness, she finds healing and peace.
Those who would find their
life must lose it. Those who would be first must be last. This teaching runs so counter
to our ambitious ways; but don’t we have to admit that Jesus was right? Our
ambitions are compulsive and suspicious and obsessive and jealous and resentful
and full of revenge. The only ambition that truly gives life is the ambition to
serve others—no matter what the cost. O Lord, make us ambitious to serve our
neighbor. Amen.