OK, I’ll admit it, for ambitious people like me this Sunday’s reading, about the demands of James and John to, “grant us to sit one at your right hand and one at your left” is more than a bit off-putting. After all, I never had an ambition to be ambitious it just came to me.

Maybe the great psychoanalyst Alfred Adler was right in positing ambition as humanity’s dominant impulse. While Sigmund Freud contended that sex was our governing urge, Adler argued that the quest for recognition, our desire for attention, is the basic drive of human life.

Perhaps that’s why Jesus didn’t come down too hard on the brothers Zebedee for their incredibly self-centered and obnoxious request. He didn’t even call them on the carpet when they immediately agreed, ‘Yes Lord, we’ll drink the cup you drink and take the baptism you’ll take!’ It’s as if they’re 4-year-olds demanding a Golden Retriever from Mom and Dad, and just as willingly agreeing, ‘Sure I’ll take him for a walk three times a day, play fetch till it’s dark and donate all my allowance to feed him until I’m 17!’

No, Jesus let James and John down ever so gently – he did not fault them for being ambitious, rather he sternly corrected them for being ambitious about the wrong things.

How many times have you and I been ambitious about the wrong things? How many relationships, possessions or experiences did we spend incredible energy to acquire only to find out it was not what we thought it was?

Check out this video to see what I mean (especially if you’re the parent of a teenaged girl).


Misdirected ambition is arguably humanity’s biggest fault. We think we know what we want, we go for it, and we find that in taking the lead we would have been much better off to have followed. And when we finally agree to follow, we find that Jesus does not take away our ambitions, He simply realigns them.

For human ambitions are often God-given, God-directed, and are at their best when they find their fulfillment in service. It is often seen when millionaires use their business acumen to clean up urban schools, good parents open up their homes to foster kids, and when you and I realize that our gifts were not given to us solely for our own pleasure and boasting, but to do God’s work.

Do any of our ambitions need redirecting?
How might the Lord be calling us to redirect them?

Reading
Among the Lilies – Ronald Rolheiser
Eventide- Kent Haruf
Microtrends-Mark Penn