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Ambition: Good or Bad

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Ambition: Good or Bad     ‘Should you then seek unconfined things for yourself?   Seek them not’.  Jeremiah 45: 5     By this time next week, the Rugby World Cup will have started in New Zealand, and the wherewithal of the physical and psychological preparation of the players will be tested in some mighty clashes.  Some time ago I read how an American footballer prepared for an upcoming match versus the Dallas Cowboys, ‘The morning will all be practice at the stadium.  Then I’ll go to my den, and load up game DVD’s and I’ll study the Cowboys until I know them largest than their wives do!  I’ll alimony watching the matches straight through until midnight every night.  Ten hours a day.  All week.  Nothing else.  I want to write-up those men.  I want to hit them so nonflexible if they come into my zone that when they’re lying on the ground, they’ll squint up to the sky with sleek vision and pray that there won’t have to be flipside play in the game.  I want to dominate their spirits’.  That’s yearing speaking!     The present world athletics championships in South Korea, and the spectacle of the forthcoming Olympic Games, with its motto, ‘Faster, higher, stronger’ have highlighted the rigid willpower which athletes are prepared to undergo in the pursuit of excellence.  Rising early each morning, punching in two hours of swimming or running surpassing breakfast is just part of a stern routine that lasts day without day, week without week, year without year, towers up to the unconfined event itself.  An American swimmer who won a handful of gold medals in his time, gave up a few years ago saying, ‘I’ve been all round the world, and I’ve seen nothing but swimming pools’.  In modern sport, such single-mined devotion is the essential condition for success.  Wasn’t it Bill Shankly, the former manager of Liverpool who tangibly said that football wasn’t a matter of life and death, it was increasingly important than that!     The same momentum is necessary for success in business.  Lord Sugar in The Apprentice tolerates no slackness.  Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate once said, ‘Aim high.  I would not requite a fig for the young man who does not once see himself the partner or the throne of an important firm.  Do not rest content for a moment in your thoughts as throne clerk, or foreman, or unstipulated manager in any concern, no matter how extensive.  Say to yourself, “My place is at the top!” ’    Versusall that worldly wisdom, set the translating of the Bible, and in particular this translating from Jeremiah the prophet to his friend Baruch, ‘Should you then seek unconfined things for yourself?  Seek them not’.  The sentiment would have come as a shock to Baruch!  He came from a home where his parents had unconfined expectations.  The name they gave him, Baruch, ways blessed, and no doubt, like many doting parents they thought the sun rose and set on their little lad.  His grandfather, Maaseaih, had served as Governor of Jerusalem under King Josiah.     In the city, Baruch was regarded as influential.  Indeed, some saw Jeremiah as an unwitting tool in the hands of the subtle Baruch.  Thus positioned, in the conviction of the royal family, and with influence in the city, Baruch must have entertained upper ambitions.  It was quite a rude risorgimento to discover that his friendship with the prophet Jeremiah was bringing him into head-on mismatch with the ruthless King Jehoiakim.  ‘No unconfined things for you, Baruch, my friend.’ Jeremiah was shielding to warn him what lay superiority for the both of them; how the authorities would try to trespassing them (36: 26); how in speaking the word of God, they would be accused of lying (43: 2); and how they would squatter captivity and death (43: 6).     Now Jeremiah’s translating might be construed in a very narrow fashion, simply telling Baruch that in this historical context it would be wrong to place all his hopes on the stability of the monarchy, for it was doomed to defeat.  I think, however, it carries a broader and wholehearted spiritual warning versus overweening ambition.  ‘Should you then seek unconfined things for yourself? Seek them not.’     But something moreover lay superiority for Baruch that no one could have predicted.  He was the one who gathered together for posterity the writings and messages of his friend Jeremiah.  For that ministry later generations have indeed tabbed him ‘Blessed’.  Fame came for him, as it so often does, as a mere by-product, the result of an unselfish act in support of a unconfined ideal.    Yearingneeds a largest printing     To undeniability someone would-be carries with it a note of criticism, and for that we probably have to vituperation William Shakespeare.  Almost every reference to yearing in his plays suggests that yearing is dangerous and unworthy.  Over the sufferer soul of Caesar, Brutus remarks, ‘As he was ambitious, I slew him’.  Elsewhere he talked well-nigh ‘vaulting ambition’, lamented the wars that made yearing virtue, and encouraged men to ‘fling yonder ambition’.  Mind you, he was would-be himself.  Peter Ackroyd, in a biography of Shakespeare, observed that there is no record of Shakespeare overly having praised flipside writer.     Christian preachers sometimes requite the same impression.  The passage we read in Mark’s gospel appears to condemn ambition.  But if you read it thoughtfully you will see that part of the reason that the colleagues of James and John were incensed at the brothers coveting the top positions was that the other disciples wanted those positions for themselves!  And Jesus did not soupcon their ambition.  He simply reminded them that every yearing has a price, asking them, ‘Are you worldly-wise to drink the cup of suffering I have to drink?’     Ungoverned ambition, of course, has been the source of widespread mischief.  Much of human history is stained with the sordid stories of men striving for power and sweeping whispered all considerations of morality in their rage for greatness and control.  But if that impulse is often misdirected, it is still an intrinsic part of our nature.  The unconfined scholar, Bishop Westcott, said, ‘If by yearing angels fell, by yearing men have risen’.  Was it wrong for a dying mother to say to her son, ‘Be somebody’?  Was it wrong for the young John Milton to confess that he longed to write something that the world would not willingly let die?  Was it wrong for the young Charles Gounod to write to his mother declaring that he wanted to be a musician, and when she rebuked him by saying that a musician amounts to nothing in the world, to reply, ‘Is it nothing to be Mozart or Rossini?’  Were they wrong?     A proper view of our own worth underlines the righteousness of such ambition.  We have been made in the image of God, just a little lower than the angels, and we have been redeemed by the thoroughbred of Christ.  There are talents and potentialities in our lives that ought to be developed, and exploited, if we are to fulfil ourselves as God’s creatures.  The mucosa My Fair Lady is based on Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion.  A professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins is teaching the Cockney girl, Eliza, how to ‘speak proper’. Withoutmuch exasperation, he bursts out, ‘You are English.  Your language is the language of Milton and Shakespeare, and you are standing there cooing like a bilious pigeon’.  Within each one of us there are unconfined potentialities.  The counsel Dr. Jowett of Balliol in Oxford gave to a young man is worth recalling, ‘Don’t expect too much, and don’t struggle too little’.    Yearingneeds a largest purpose     Baruch was feeling low when he realised that his fondest dreams were untellable of fulfilment.  He was at odds with the king; the nation was on the brink of dissolution; his hopes were irretrievably dashed.  In that situation God had two things to teach Baruch.  First, Baruch’s heartache was as nothing compared to the spiritual traumatization in the heart of God.  There is no sorrow like unto His sorrow.  Verse 4, ‘I will overthrow what I have built, and uproot what I have planted’.  How it must have grieved God to see the downfall of the nation he had cared for so laboriously over the years.     Second, Baruch had to learn to thrust self into the background.  In verse 3 in the Hebrew text the personal pronoun occurs 5 times, but plane the NIV conveys the self-centredness of it, ‘You said, Woe to me!  The Lord has widow sorrow to my pain.  I am worn out with groaning and find no rest’.  It is the same obsession with self that the Pharisee expressed in his Temple prayer, in one of Jesus’ parables, ‘I thank you that I am not as other men are.  I fast twice in the week.  I requite tithes of all that I possess...’. Baruch is wallowing in self-pity, hugging his sorrow to himself. Yearingneeds to be purged of selfishness.  ‘Do you seek unconfined things for yourself?  Seek them not.’  It is quite flipside thing, however, to seek them for others and for God.     The upholder Paul was an would-be man, but note the focus of his ambition.  There is a rare Greek verb (Philotimeomai) which he used to show the ambitions which governed him.  ‘We make it our goal to please him’. (2 Corinthians 5: 9).  The bottoms of the crowd, or the smiles of the powerful meant nothing if he did not have the clearance of the Man of Nazareth.  The late Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Basil Hume, in a little typesetting entitled To be a pilgrim wrote, ‘Only one thing matters, and that is what God thinks of me.  To be upper in his regard is the biggest yearing any person can have’.     Paul revealed flipside of his governing ambitions when writing to the Romans, ‘It has unchangingly been my yearing to preach the gospel where Christ was not known’. (15: 20).  When David Livingstone was interviewed by the London Missionary Society and was asked where he would like to go, he replied, ‘Anywhere, so long as it is forward’.  In the middle of the American Civil War, the famous ConfederateUnstipulatedknown as Stonewall Jackson, prayed this prayer, ‘0 God, settle this unforgiving warfare, and send us when to our homes to our God-given purpose of winning men to Jesus Christ’.     Paul expressed flipside of his executive ambitions to the Thessalonians, ‘Make it your yearing to lead a quiet life’. (1 Thessalonians 4: 11).  Excitement was at fever pitch in that city, for the Christians there had downed tools and were standing virtually waiting for the return of Jesus Christ.  Paul attempted to defuse the situation.  Live quietly.  Let him find you doing your duty when he comes. Covet ‘the quiet eyeful of an ordered life’.  The Scottish denomination leader, Principal Robert Rainy of New College, Edinburgh, who supposed a teenage yearing to be ‘eminently spiritual’, wrote this, ‘Today I must lecture.  Tomorrow I must shepherd a committee meeting.  On Sunday I must preach.  Some day I must die.  Well then, let us do as well as we can each thing as it comes to us’.     Paul’s writings teem with references to running and boxing and plane chariot racing.  He noticed how diligently athletes strived to win the prize, in their specimen a crown of laurel leaves, which quickly withered. Paul, on the other hand, was striving to win an unfading crown of righteousness.    Surpassingevery baseball match the individual members of a team were required to enter a room alone, and stand surpassing a wall on which was written the slogan, ‘For Chicago, I will’ and then pass on to the pitch to join other members of the team.  Can we examine our plans and our ambitions, and say, ‘For Christ, I will’?     Should you then seek unconfined things for yourself?  Seek them not.  No, seek them for God!   -------