Daily Mass Gospel Reflection - Spiritual Heroism

Word on Fire Ministry ^ | 12-09-21 | Aux. Bishop R. Barron

[MurphsLaw]

Second Week of Advent

Matthew 11:11-15

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus says to the crowds, “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent are taking it by force.” The title for Flannery O’Connor’s irresistibly powerful second and final novel, The Violent Bear It Away, is taken from the Douay-Rheims translation of this last phrase.

This famously ambiguous passage has given rise to a variety of interpretations over the centuries. Many have taken it to mean that the kingdom of God is attacked by violent people (such as those who killed John the Baptist) and that they threaten to take it away. But others have interpreted it in the opposite direction, as a word of praise to the spiritually violent who manage to get into the kingdom. Flannery O’Connor herself sides with this latter group.

The “violent,” on this reading, are those spiritually heroic types who resist the promptings and tendencies of our fallen nature and seek to discipline it in various ways in order to enter into the kingdom of God.

Reflect: Flannery O’Connor proposes that the violence Jesus speaks of in this passage is positive. Reflect on what it would look like in your own life to become “spiritually heroic.”

[MurphsLaw]

+++Jesus said to the crowds:
“Amen, I say to you,
among those born of women
there has been none greater
than John the Baptist;

yet the least in the Kingdom of heaven
is greater than he.

From the days of John the Baptist until now,
the Kingdom of heaven suffers violence,
and the violent are taking it by force.
All the prophets and the law prophesied up to
the time of John.
And if you are willing to accept it,
he is Elijah, the one who is to come.
Whoever has ears ought to hear.”+++