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 today. Unity seems more appropriate to us now than division; we would like every division between people to disappear, and unity seems to us better than division by definition. And so it is when secondary matters are concerned. From the Gospel's perspective, as from the perspective of spiritual life in general, all our divisions—cultural, linguistic, racial, even religious—are essentially secondary and do not touch what matters most: our relationship with God and its dynamics. It is the dynamics of our relationships with God and with our neighbors that matter most; everything else is secondary. In this respect, people are divided into only two categories: those whose lives contain a relationship with God and the dynamics associated with it, and those whose lives do not.
A complete absence of relationship with God naturally means the complete destruction of the human personality, often followed by physical destruction as well. Yet one can also speak of this relationship being formed and strengthened, or of its gradual degradation and tendency toward total destruction. Ultimately, in the context and prospect of the Kingdom entering the world, the question must be one of striving toward the fullness of the Kingdom's life or of self-isolation: an attempt to shut oneself off, create one's own little enclosed world, and become its king, its sole master and ruler. The fallen world exists precisely in such isolation, and therefore the fundamental Christian division is the division between those who seek the life of the Kingdom and those who are content with the life of this world, the fallen world.
Here division really is absolutely inevitable. The two spiritual vectors just described are incompatible—not because some people are “spiritual” and others are not, but because some seek life and move into life, while others are content with a life-that-is-dying, a gradual descent into the death that reigns in the fallen world. These are not different views or convictions but opposite directions of spiritual movement, which inevitably divide those who choose them. People moving in different, mutually opposite directions cannot, after all, remain united.