Be Ambitions For The Higher Gifts
(By Fr. Dexter Brereton)
This week’s Gospel teaches us about ambition – the right kind and the wrong kind.
[simpleazon-image align=”left” asin=”1612788351″ locale=”us” height=”375″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51yLQoRsqsL.jpg” width=”317″]The cup that I must drink you shall drink, and with the baptism with which I must be baptized you shall be baptized, but as for seats at my right hand or my left, these are not mine to grant; they belong to those to whom they have been allotted.
Today’s gospel story is a story of ambition. Whenever I think of ambition, I am always moved to draw an analogy based on food. In Trinidadian culture, pepper is perhaps our favourite condiment. It spices up food and makes it exciting. Pepper is indeed good in “small doses” but anything more than this, completely spoils the entire dish. In a very similar way, ambition is useful in small doses – or rather the CORRECT kind of ambition is a useful and great thing. The overweening ambition of the sons of Zebedee however is concerned with being better and higher than other people and ‘making their authority felt.’ This is not godly ambition.
What then, is godly ambition? For example, a person may be ambitious about living a particular kind of life– I may be ambitious to create a life where hours of prayer and meditation and reading are a regular part of it. I may be ambitious to create a family where all of us, parents, children and any other relatives all know the Lord. I may be ambitious to fulfill what I believe to be God’s will for me: becoming a lay missionary in some part of the globe – or becoming a teacher or a police officer or a nurse. I may be ambitious that the small business that I own be run in such a way that it is ‘life-giving’ for both customers and staff. This is the kind of ‘ambition’ which elevates. The ambition of the sons of Zebedee is of a different kind however.
Jesus answers their request for seats at his right and left with a challenge of his own: ‘Can you drink the cup that I must drink, or be baptized with the baptism with which I must be baptized?’ This language about “cup” and “baptism” are clear references to his approaching passion and death. To sit with Jesus in glory in the first place, demands drinking the cup of suffering to the dregs. More often than not, in the Caribbean today, those who claim to occupy the seats of glory in society, politicians and other civic leaders, are not given to seeing their leadership in this way.
As we in Trinidad and Tobago begin a new political administration, after our last general elections, once again, as with the last transition, we are hearing accusations of government officials living luxuriously off the fat of the land, full of corruption etc. When I worked in a rural parish in Haiti, occasionally we would receive visits from officials living in Port-au-Prince and these would come to our village in the most expensive SUV’s one could imagine, well dressed with European leather shoes and so on. It was hard to believe that many of these officials, in fact came from rural areas just like the one in which we were living, but once they got their education, took the first road out of the village and simply never looked back. They became completely alienated from their own roots. While this problem may be widespread in the Caribbean, I strongly suspect it is not a purely Caribbean phenomenon – especially when one listens to American commentators making distinctions between “Wall Street” and “Main Street” or speak of “Washington” as if it were a town on a different planet, cut off from the concerns of real people.
Apart from challenging the sons of Zebedee with the suffering of his own life, Jesus tells them that true greatness is not something that one could grab for oneself. “…but as for seats at my right hand or my left, these are not mine to grant, they belong to those to whom they have been allotted.” In other words, this ‘greatness’ is completely out of his hands. Leaders, who realize that the esteem and the respect of their people is not something they could ‘grab’ for themselves, are free people and not obsessed with their own self-image as many are today.
Dear Lord we thank you for those leaders like Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King who have accepted to “drink the cup” which Jesus drank and to be “baptized” with the baptism with which Jesus was baptized. We bless you for their courage which led them to see that leadership was about service and not about being higher or better than others. Thank you for the wisdom teaching that seats at Jesus’ right hand and left “are not his to grant but belong to those to whom they are allotted”. In the final analysis, we must accept that honour lies not in our own hands, nor is it something we can grab from others. This leaves us free Lord to do the work you have sent us to do with calm confidence knowing that you will see all of our efforts. Amen.
