NOTES for Luk 12:51-52
These words of Jesus about the division He brought into the world trouble some readers of the Gospel, especially in our days. Today unity rather than division seems more appropriate to us; we would like all divisions between people to disappear, and unity seems to us better than division by definition.
So it is when the matter concerns secondary things. From the gospel point of view, as from the point of view of spiritual life in general, all our divisions, cultural, linguistic, racial, even religious, are in essence secondary and do not touch the main thing: our relations with God and their dynamics. From the gospel point of view, as from the point of view of spiritual life in general, it is precisely the dynamics of relations with God and neighbor that are primary, while everything else is secondary. In this respect people are divided into only two categories: those in whose life relations with God and the dynamics connected with them are present, and those in whose life they are not.
Of course, a complete absence of relations with God means for a person the complete destruction of personality, often followed by physical destruction as well; but one can speak of the formation and strengthening of these relations or of their gradual degradation, a tendency toward their complete destruction. At the limit, in the context and perspective of the Kingdom entering the world, the issue must be striving for the fullness of the life of the Kingdom, or self-isolation, an attempt to fence oneself off, to create one's own little closed world and become king in it, its only master and ruler. The fallen world exists precisely in such isolation, and therefore the main Christian division is connected with the division between those seeking the life of the Kingdom and those satisfied with the life of this world, the fallen world.
Here division is indeed absolutely inevitable: the two spiritual vectors mentioned are incompatible, not because some are "spiritual" and others are not, but because some seek life and go toward life, while others are satisfied with life-as-dying, with a gradual sinking into the death that reigns in the fallen world. Here the issue is not different views or convictions, but opposite directions of spiritual movement, which inevitably divide those who choose them. People going in different, opposite directions cannot in fact remain united.