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The relevance of sacred scripture is brought home to me in a special way whenever I read in the Bible something which reminds me of something I have just read in the media.

That was the case with today’s first reading, which begins with the rhetorical question: “What causes wars and what causes fightings among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war” (James 4:1-2).

These verse could provide the text for the cover article in this week’s issue of TIME magazine, entitled “The Secrets of Ambition.” Instead, the article quotes the words of Machievelli: “Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast that however high we reach, we are never satisfied.” This is the same point that the Letter of James is making.

Ethically speaking, ambition is neutral. Ambition was undoubtedly the driving force behind Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein. Vita Sackville-West called ambition “the immemorial weakness of the strong.” But it was also ambition which inspired Ignatius Loyola, as he passed his time while recuperating from the wound he had received at the Battle of Pamplona by reading the lives of the saints, to ask himself the fateful question: “Could I not do what they have done?” So ambition can also be the expression of magnanimity.

Ambition is like the gasoline in a car: it does not determine where the car will go, but, without it, the car won’t go anywhere. Don Quixote was motivated by his “impossible dream,” but “grand dreams, unmoored from morals, are the stuff of tyrants” (TIME). It is the relation between morality and ambition which concerns us as Christians, more than “how genes, gender, privilege and persistence shape your will to succeed” (TIME).

The ethics of Jesus demand a religion of the heart and thus abrogate the external observance of the law as the way to God. All human accomplishments, however impressive, are thereby relativized. The only appropriate response to the divine mercy is the total and unconditional surrender of the whole person.

The trust expressed in the “Abba” title which Jesus used in addressing God (Mark 14:36) prevents the disciple from looking forward to a reward in the calculating spirit of the elder son in the Parable of the Prodigal (Luke 15:25-30). (Calculation, of course, is essential in all business dealings.)

Jesus holds out the promise of a reward in heaven (e.g. Matthew 6:20), but he represents this reward not as earned wages but as a gift coming from God’s unfathomable and undeserved generosity (Matthew 20:1-16, especially verse 15). In the words of our second reading, “When you have done all that is commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty’” (Luke 17:10).

November 13, 2005

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