While the Gospels frequently highlight the apostles’ lack of understanding, today’s passage presents an occasion when they understood at least “some thing.” They understood enough to be embarrassed. They knew that they should not have been discussing who was the greatest.
The apostles were human. Each had an ego. Each was in varying degrees ambitious. This is part of human nature—in the apostles and in each of us.
It is not always about ambition for money, power, or pleasure, but we can be passionately concerned about being noticed, not wanting to be passed over. [Consider being seated at a wedding reception…”Why I am at Table 17…shouldn’t I be at Table 2 or 3?]
What does our Lord teach us about ambition? Does he condemn ambition? Is a disciple prohibited to excel, to do great things in life?
The Gospels reveal that Jesus doesn’t condemn ambition. His teaching doesn’t inhibit one from excelling in life. Nowhere in the Gospel does Our Lord say that self-interest is bad or that aspiring to an important office or station is a sin.
Jesus teaches the ambition has a condition. “If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” In other words, attaining our ambition, greatness, position, and authority is not to be at the expense of others but for the benefit of others. Jesus says his disciples are to embrace the paradox that the first must be last, the greatest must be the least; the leader must be the servant. At the Last Supper he would model this teaching when he washed the feet of the apostles. In the view of the Lord, the way up is down.
St. Francis and Mother Teresa of Calcutta are models of humility and service and who would not put them in first place? Yes, we see this in the saints of old, but we catch glimpses of living out this Gospel paradox: consider a husband and wife, parents who so often say ‘No” to their own desires and ambitions for the sake of their spouse and children.
This is our constant challenge. Pope Benedict expressed this in an eloquent way back in 2012:
“If Adam wanted to imitate God, this was not a bad thing in itself but he had the wrong idea of God. God is not someone who only wants greatness. God is love which was already given in the Trinity and was then given in the Creation; and imitating God means coming out of oneself, giving oneself in love…The ascent to God occurs precisely in the descent of humble service.”
In our Mass today, let us fix our gaze on the Crucified One, who humbly lowered himself so that we might be lifted up. Let my ambitions be subject to his condition.
