Suppose you that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division:
All Commentaries on Luke 12:51 Go To Luke 12
Ambrose of Milan
AD 397
Spiritual understanding is at work in every passage of the Gospels. In the present case, fearing that the rigidity of a simple explanation may offend someone, the sequence of the sense is to be qualified by spiritual depth…. We will believe that the Lord took care to advise reverence for the Godhead at the same time as the grace of piety. He said, “You will love the Lord your God, and you will love your neighbor.” Is the present so changed as to erase the names of close kin and set affections at variance? Are we to believe that he has commanded discord within families? How is he our peace, who has made both one? How does he himself say, “My peace I give to you, my peace I leave with you,” if he has come to separate fathers from sons and sons from fathers by the division of households? How is he cursed who dishonors his father and devout who forsakes him? If we observe that the first is because of religion and the second through piety, we shall think this question is simple. It is necessary that we should esteem the human less than the divine. If honor is to be paid to parents, how much more to your parents’ Creator, to whom you owe gratitude for your parents! If they by no means recognize their Father, how do you recognize them? He does not say children should reject a father but that God is to be set before all. Then you have in another book, “He that loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” You are not forbidden to love your parents, but you are forbidden to prefer them to God. Natural children are true blessings from the Lord, and no one must love the blessing that he has received more than God by whom the blessing, once received, is preserved. –.
