20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

by Fr. Jess Ty  |  08/17/2025  |  Weekly Reflection

Dear Family of God,

What did Jesus meant in saying: “Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division” (Luke 12:51)

According to Dr. Brant Pitre: An interpretation comes to us from St. Ambrose of Milan. St. Ambrose was the bishop of Milan, a Latin-speaking Church Father in the 4th Century who played a key role in the conversion of St. Augustine.

And in St. Ambrose’s Exposition of the Gospel of Luke, this is what he says: Are we to believe that he has commanded discord within families?... He does not say that a father is to be rejected by his children, but that God is to be set before all...

St. Ambrose is dealing with a potential objection to Jesus’ statement that “I came to bring division in families”. I mean, don’t the Ten Commandments say, “honor your father and mother”? How can you reconcile that with Jesus’ statement here? Is Jesus a home wrecker? In other words, is his mission to cause strife and division? To cause children to dishonor their parents? “No,” Ambrose says. But this is what he’s saying: “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.”

And what Ambrose is saying here is that although all children are called to honor their parents, by means of this saying, Jesus is making clear that we cannot prefer any family member (father, mother, daughter-in-law, whatever it might be) to God. God has ultimate precedence, and discipleship to Jesus takes precedence over all other things. As he says elsewhere in the gospel, “He who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” And that’s a negative way of saying that love of God takes precedent over all other things.

May the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, help us to chose God’s will over our own will.