Only One Hero

Ambition is a sticky wicket for committed Christians. Goals that begin righteous and good are quickly corrupted when the Old Adam sticks his crooked nose into them. The stated intent to “do great things for God,” for example, easily elides the all-important last two words. I know that I’m not immune.

When I first took the call to the parish I served in rural northern Michigan, I was feeling pretty good about myself. And frankly, most of the congregants did little to discourage it. The congregation, like so many country churches, had fallen on hard times. Its surrounding community was graying and shrinking, and the dreaded “woe is me” attitude had started to creep in. For a young(ish) preacher with a family — and a doctorate to boot! — to be willing to come and serve … why, I could nearly walk on water! But then I had a sobering conversation with a brother pastor that I’ll never forget.

Josh and I are about the same age, and we were installed as shepherds of our respective congregations only a week apart. Whereas I’m the energetic, get-up-and-go type, Josh is the speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-stick type. He’s a bigger guy and with his size carries a certain gravitas about him that belies his age. If not for his millennial affection for ’90s pop culture, I’d swear he was a member of the greatest generation.

One day, early in our respective pastorates, we rode together to a meeting a couple of hours away. On the way back, I subjected him to a succession of humble-brags about what dire straits my congregation had been in, but how, aww shucks, God was using me to bring it back from the brink. I went on in this vein for some time, and Josh suffered (in the full sense of the term) my blatherings. Finally, I gave him leeway in the conversation to speak up — preferably to laud my outstanding efforts. After a moment’s quiet and simply staring out the windshield at the road, he said, “You know, Ryan, pastors don’t make good heroes. We’ve already got a Hero, and it’s our job just to point to him.” And then he shut up.

Welp: fork, knife, crow.

Though it stung at the time (and still does in retrospect), I am so grateful for Josh’s wise counsel. He caused me to reevaluate my early ministry at the congregation and repent of that all too human temptation to make a name for myself. My job wasn’t — isn’t — to be a hero, but to point to our Hero.

The desire to make a mark for the kingdom, to make your life count, can all too easily devolve into the selfish ambition that seeks personal glory. Making a name for yourself is not the aim of the Christian life. We already have a Hero. And he turns selfish ambition, and the quest to make a name for yourself, upside down.

Downward Mobility

Was Jesus ambitious?

Answering this question is not nearly so straightforward as it might seem. The Son of God is not easily cornered.

Where to begin? Commonly we’ll look to Jesus’ “I AM” statements (the bread of life, the light of the world, etc.). Less often attended to are Jesus’ “I came” statements: his expressions of personal mission and aim. Which is to say, his ambition.

“I came that they may have life and have it abundantly,” Jesus says (Jn 10:10). He tells the grumbling Pharisees, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mt 9:13). And again, laying it out plainly, “I came, not to judge the world, but to save the world” (Jn 12:47). To say that Jesus is ambitious is like saying the universe is pretty big: it understates the case by exponential orders of magnitude.

Given these cosmically grand ambitions, then, how would you expect him to carry them out? Perhaps there would be a celestial message campaign: notes from on high, written in the sky. Or if not composed in the clouds, then at least by means of mass media: a flood of letters, drafted by the Savior and sent to each doorstep — divine direct mail. Or a worldwide speaking tour: a globe-trotting, whistle-stop campaign that would make the indefatigable Teddy Roosevelt look like a puttering homebody. Or at the very least, the establishment of a prominent platform in Rome or Alexandria — some ancient metroplex, from which he could propagate his teaching and catalyze a movement. Any and all of these tactics would befit the grand ambitions of one who claims he came to save the world.

And yet Jesus eschews it all. He wrote nothing, in the sky or otherwise. He came from a town so tiny and backward that it elicited the derisive question from one of his future disciples, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” When crowds grew and fame loomed, he retreated to desolate places — or, alternatively, unleashed decidedly unpopular teachings, like, “If anyone doesn’t hate his family he can’t be my disciple.” (Where’s the PR team when you need them?) And given the opportunity to shortcut his mission and lay claim to “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory” by simply offering his obeisance to the Tempter, Jesus emphatically declines. For someone who supposedly has such exalted aims, he sure has a strange way of pursuing them.

When we zoom out and see the whole heavenly picture, though, ministry backwaters, difficult sermons, and diabolical temptations aren’t the half of it. In Philippians 2, Paul paints a picture of downward mobility that takes your breath away:

[Christ Jesus], though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing … (Phil 2:6–8).

This is almost an exact inversion of the “upward mobility” reflective of ambitious humanity from the Tower of Babel to the present day. Rather than greedily grasping for security, Jesus generously surrenders divine equality. Instead of scaling the heights of heaven, he willingly descends into the depths. He passes ambitious humanity on the way down the ladder. It makes no earthly sense — quite literally.

And why does he do it? Jesus bottoms out to lift us up. So that we would not sink down eternally, Jesus was willingly swallowed by the quicksand, drowned in the flood.

But then a remarkable thing happens:

God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:9–11).

God did not leave his Son to languish in the prison house of death. The Father vindicates Jesus’ faithful obedience, his downward mobility, by raising him from the dead.

So was Jesus ambitious, or unambitious? We have to say that the answer is … yes. He is the paragon of the unambitious ambition.

This makes all the difference as we seek to lead lives that count, that make a mark for the kingdom. We don’t need to be the hero, as I was foolishly trying to do in my parish; we already have a Hero. And we do not need to make a name for ourselves. Jesus has made a name for us and bestows it on us. When we are baptized, we’re given the name of God Almighty. We don’t need to climb up the ladder to make our lives matter. Jesus climbed down it to ensure that they already do, more than we could ever know.

Ryan Tinetti is assistant professor of practical theology at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. His book, The Quiet Ambition, is available November 18th from InterVarsity Press.