“And whosoever of you will be chiefest shall be the servant of all.”

(Mark 10:44 )

(incident of James and John wanting the chief seats)

At no point of our desperate human situation do we need the saving power and merciful ministry of Jesus Christ more than in the area of our ambitions. At the very center of the well springs of our spiritual life lie our ambitions. Here are the origins of all our motivation. Here are the directional finders, which fix our goals and direct our efforts.

We need Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, to save us from our sins, from our fears, from our despair, but how urgently we need Him also to save us from false and unworthy ambitions. As Jesus came to James and John, the sons of Zebedee, those ambitious brothers, to minister to their spiritual needs in the area of their ambitions, so He comes to us today, and if we will permit Him, it is in this self-same area of our ambitions that He can do most for us to save us unto life eternal.

Have you ever noticed what surprising things sometimes spark ambition or reveal it? The setting of our gospel story is a case in point. Jesus is making His determined march on Jerusalem. The disciples notice there is a resolute set to His jaw and firmness about His tread. His talk along the way to them is openly about the consummation of His ministry, His inescapable suffering and imminent death. Soon He must depart from them. The circle of their happy friendship will be broken. He talks plainly of last and final things.

And the disciples? What is their reaction to such a situation? Why some of them, James and John at least, begin to think of their rewards in their Master’s Kingdom. As the air grows electric with impending catastrophe, and the shadow of a cross falls across their leader’s face, and the time grows short for conversation with Him, why, it is the part of wisdom to make one’s requests known while it is still time, before it is too late. So James and John out with their ambition to have the chief seats in the Kingdom.

Whenever families gather for a funeral, uppermost in the minds of some are the provisions of the will. Before the grave is filled or the last benediction is said — their thoughts run: “The will, the will, let us hear the will! What did he leave for me?”

What vultures, hyenas, and jackals most men and women are! Whatever the circumstances of sorrow or rejoicing, their first thoughts seem to be: “Here is a situation — what can I get out of it for myself?” Let a businessman begin to lose his health or grow tired and fall behind in the race, and watch his competitors and his associates scheme to see what they can make for themselves out of his debacle.

Yes, the changing scene of human experience reveals most strikingly the ambitions of men.

Furthermore, it should be no surprise to us that ambitious men would expect their religion to serve their ambition. James and John considered themselves some of Jesus’ most faithful followers. When He began to discuss His demise and the coming Kingdom they thought naturally of their own rewards, and they were frank and honest enough to speak them out to their Lord. “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.”

Is this not the commonplace expectation of the average religious person as he prays? “Whatever I want and ask for, God, give it to me.” What do we want more than the fulfillment of our ambitions, the achievement of our ultimate goals? What more fervent prayer do we have, unuttered or expressed?

Yet, Halford Luccock says of this petition of Zebedee’s sons: “This is the final form of unacceptable prayer. ‘Master, we ask that whatever we desire of you, you will grant it.’ It was sincere. It was earnest, but it was wrong. James and John were asking Jesus to fit into their plans. They had no concern at the moment of fitting into His plans. Prayer is always unacceptable when it says: ‘You do what I want done.’ Christian prayer, rather, says with Christ, ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,’ and ‘Not my will, but thine, be done.’ When our prayer makes demands on God to adjust Himself to our desires, when it does not test desire by His nature, and ambition by His purposes; when the loud, strident ‘I’ drowns out the ‘Thou,’ we do not pray in the name and spirit of Jesus.”

Of course, gradually we should mature in our faith to the point where we see that the privilege of prayer is not something we use to get from God what we want, but rather we come to see it as the avenue along which we come reverently to offer ourselves to God for His purposes.

First, the Savior would have us see that ambition always exacts its price. This is not only the lesson Jesus would teach James and John, it is the lesson that is written on all of life. Emerson has said that God asks everyone: “What do you want?” and then says to them: “Take it and pay for it.”

Jesus said to the ambitious sons of Zebedee: “All right, you say you want precedence in the Kingdom of God, are you able to pay the price? Consider well the cost. Whatever you aspire to and go after will cost you. Are you able to pay the price?”

What is the price for achieving pre-eminence in the Kingdom of God? Jesus speaks of it symbolically in terms of what Protestant Christians have chosen for their two sacraments — the cup and the baptism. “Are ye able to drink the cup that I drink and to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?”

The cup is the cup of the world’s pain and suffering which the Savior willingly took. “Part of a Christian’s saving force in the world is a Christian’s sensitiveness to human need and that brings real pain. To expose our nerves to the hurts of others, to load their burdens onto our shoulders already laden, to let the heart be torn with anguish over suffering which we can legally claim is none of our business, that is not easy, but it is the cup that Jesus drank. Sensitiveness is the mark of higher development in the biological world. It is also the mark of higher ascent in the spiritual world. The lowly amoebae does not have it. Neither does the clam. No one ever heard of a clam with a nervous breakdown. There is nothing to break down. With a great price, have we obtained this freedom as men — the price of pain in a highly developed nervous system. High rank in the Kingdom of God has the same marks — a very highly developed nervous system with the capacity to feel the pain in the suffering of others. Can we drink that cup?

“The Baptism with which Jesus is baptized means putting ourselves into conflict with evil and dangerous powers. Jesus could have probably avoided that kind of trouble by staying in Galilee. He was not brought to trial for saying: ‘Consider the lilies, how they grow!’ It was for saying: ‘Consider the thieves in the temple, how they steal.’ That is what brought on the crisis. So many of us get no farther in our religion than considering the lilies. We never carry through to their logical conclusions the affirmations of our faith concerning justice, righteousness, and love.” (Interpreters Bible on Text)

Are we able to pay the price for our ambitions to achieve pre-eminence in the Kingdom of God, the price the Savior paid, to drink His cup of suffering and to endure the fiery baptism of His ordeal?

Finally, Jesus helps us today as He did the sons of Zebedee long ago, by showing us the vast unbridgeable chasm that forever separates the ultimate goals, and the avenues of progress toward those goals, for the ambitious in the world and for the ambitious in the Kingdom of God.

“The Lords of the gentiles,” said Jesus, “exercise authority over their subjects and prove their pre-eminence by lording it over their people. Theirs is the strut and the swagger and the careful calculation of how much higher and better they are than their fellows. But not so shall it be among you.”

Yesterday in the United Nations, the Security Council, by a vote of 9 to 0, declared to the Union of South Africa that their troublesome Apartheid system of separateness or apartness — of one group of human beings lording it over another group — must go.

It has been almost 2000 years ago since Jesus said to His disciples that this way of the world’s ambitious is done for. “Give it up,” He counseled His disciples. “Not so shall it be among you.”

“But as for you, if you are ambitious in the things of the Kingdom of God; if you want to rise in His esteem; if you want to achieve the heights of His glory, I’ll show you how; bend your back in service. “He who would be greatest among you, in My Kingdom, let him become the servant of all.”

And in the Fourth Gospel, the author tells the story of how Jesus not only proclaimed this truth by word of mouth, but how he acted it out in silent convincing drama. When the arguing disciples were disputing among themselves who was really the greatest and were scornfully refusing to perform for each other the needed, necessary but humble service of washing one another’s feet, the Lord Himself took the towel and the basin, and in loving tenderness, bowed Himself to perform that lowly service.

In the heart of the Cambodian jungle, overgrown with vines and trees, there lay four hundred years the lost and unknown ruins of beautiful Angkor Wat. Its culture and its people had perished. It was lost from the sight of man and the knowledge of the world.

So perish ultimately all self-seeking individuals and cultures in the jungle of other plants and animals who live by the first law of the jungle — self-preservation. But now and then, some great soul forgets himself into immortality — and humanity remembers gratefully unto all eternity because a Ghandi or a Schweitzer or a Livingstone was become great by becoming the servant of all.

The Kingdom of the earth go by

In purple and in gold;

They rise, they triumph, and they die,

And all their tale is told.

Our kingdom only is divine;

One banner triumphs still,

Its king a servant, and its sign

A gibbet on a hill.

            Geofrey Fox Bradley

Have we ambitions? Well, what are they? Are our ambitions of this world or of the Kingdom of Christ? If our ambitions are of the world and its glory, let us clearly recognize that it is Satan and his crew that we serve. If it is Christ and His imperishable Kingdom, dedicated to service of the last and the lost and the least from God Almighty on down to His humblest, sincere servant, then let us put in our two-bits worth there and move on to the consummation of that Kingdom. But let us no longer continue as fuzzy-headed fools, standing in the midst of His church beating our breasts to proclaim our pious orthodoxy, while demanding for ourselves the chief seats, refusing the good things of life to others of His children, and declining to take the first basic fundamental step of performing lowly service to the most needy of Christ’s little ones that are closest to us in their pitiable despair.

O Lord, clarify our purposes and cleanse our ambitions!