Submission: “The Violence of Love”
Scott Lyons
11/9/2009

In the discipline of Submission, we must resign ourselves to the will of God, though “resign” and “submission” have come to mean something too passive. Jesus says, “And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force” (Matthew 11:12, KJV). This enigmatic verse has been translated in a myriad of ways, many of which seem contrary to one another. But when the early Church Fathers spoke of this verse they spoke with one voice. They did not speak of an outside force attacking Christ or Christians. They did not speak of aggressive evangelism. Instead they spoke of violence toward one’s own flesh and passions. And of this kind of violence, John the Baptist is representative, a type.

This violence is not directed outwardly, but inwardly—as Flannery O’Connor says when speaking about the title of her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away; it is “the violence of love.” Jesus is speaking of the ascetic life, the disciplined life, the life of men and women like John the Baptist. This is the life of submission, of resignation to the will of God. Our submission is not passive, it is, and must be, a violence to the self, the old man, the flesh. It is laying down our wills, killing them that God’s will be done. Our “Yes” of assent to God is not a “Yes, I guess so” kind of assent, neither is it a “Yes, if it must be so” kind of assent. It is the assent of a soldier obeying the will of his commander to charge even though he will most certainly die. It is an assent that springs ever out of love and moves ever toward love.

The flesh must be killed; it must be given no quarter. Violent men and women are seizing the kingdom of Heaven, they are becoming holy, they are bearing Christ into the world that the world might be rescued from sin and death. The French novelist Léon Bloy writes, “The only tragedy in life is not to be a saint.” What he means is something slightly different that what some of us mean when we say “saint”: He means that the only tragedy in life is not to be holy, holy in all our energies—our words and deeds. (And this of course, by grace.) It is no tragedy never to become the president. It is no tragedy never to be a millionaire or become the CEO of your company. It is no tragedy never to be the teacher of the year, a published author, a business owner or otherwise achieve the American Dream. The only tragedy is to miss what Christ himself dreams for us. And how, by God’s grace, do we become holy? By seizing the kingdom, by refusing to let go until the Lord blesses us, by understanding that this life is and must only be about one thing, becoming like Christ. No price is too great for this prize, no violence too severe.

This drives me to a necessary clarification. The essence of holiness is love. Doing violence to our flesh in order to become holy does not mean that others are to be conquered. It does not mean that the Divine is to be conquered. It is the flesh that must be conquered—that autonomous self that rose up in the Garden. The flesh is the place of our battle, the place wherein we take hold of the kingdom. Killing our passions, the flesh, is done precisely because we love God, precisely because we love our neighbors and our families, and even precisely because we love ourselves. It is in this death that we discover life. There is the danger here, of course, of confusing the process for the prize. There is the danger here, especially here, of confusing pride with humility. So we must be vigilant to guard ourselves, to love, and to cease from judgments.
The discipline of Submission is no gentle proposition. Paul says, “I discipline my body like an athlete, training it to do what it should. Otherwise, I fear that after preaching to others I myself might be disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9:27, NLT). We too must beat our bodies until our lives revolve around Christ’s life. All our desires and activities contrary to Christ must be put to death. When I have more important things to do than pray, then I have lost my bearings and have become confused as to what is essential to life. That is not to say that we ignore the crying baby because we are in the middle of our devotions. It does not mean that we show up to work sanctimoniously late because, well, we had to pray. It is not neglecting our duties, but understanding where our primary duty lies. And as we neglect our duties, home and work—those things to which we’ve been called—we neglect our primary duty. (We cannot love God and hate our brother.) It might entail waking up earlier or turning off the television earlier. It may well entail something very different for each one of us. But it certainly means that we must do violence to the flesh—this is the violence of love—in order to submit to God’s will for us.