Homily

Unity and division--these are two key words for today's readings. We hear in St. John's Gospel the words of our Lord, as He prays to His heavenly Father and asking Him to keep the disciples as one, even as He and the Father are one. On the other hand, we hear St. Paul today warns the leaders of the parish in Ephesus that, after he goes, they need to be careful because wolves will get in among the flock and the damage and division they can cause will be serious. This reading is chosen for today because it describes what happened when the teachings of the priest Arius, began to take hold of some people in the Church.

Arius lived in Alexandria, Egypt, born about the year 250 A.D. To put it very simply, Arius began to preach that the Word of God, Jesus Christ, was not God. He quoted the Gospel of John, 14:28 where Jesus tells the disciple, "If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going back to the Father, for the Father is greater than I." Arius believed that Jesus was not God, but only the highest of all creatures that God the Father had created. If Jesus was begotten of the Father, then He had a beginning, and if He had a beginning, He cannot be God. This caused one of the greatest heresies of the early Church to take root, and from the end of the third century and for almost a hundred years after that the Church was deeply divided over this false teaching. The emperor Constantine called for a meeting of all the bishops of the Church to settle this question in the year 325 AD, and the Fathers of that council declared Jesus to be true God of true God, begotten but not created and equal to the Father. The truth won out, but even so, many Christians would not accept the teachings of this council, and Arianism continued to divide the Church for many decades. St. Paul's warning proved to be true, not only in the case of Arianism, but many, many times throughout the history of the Church, as wolves enter in and cause division among the flock.

We find division early on in the history of humanity as Adam and Eve decide to separate themselves from their union with God and strike out on their own by eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Then Adam separates himself from his wife by suggesting it was her idea to do it. And shortly after we see the division in the family as Cain takes the life of his brother Abel. Dividing people, one from another, is a tool that Satan has used from the very beginning to damage mankind and it is a tool that is still effective today. It is probably not very often that people hold the notion that being divided from other people is a good thing in itself, yet the choices people make result in splits between people as a direct result of thoughts and actions.

Now let me say first of all not all division is automatically bad. Certainly not. Separating the whites from the coloreds is sinful--unless you are doing laundry, in which case I highly recommend it. We need to be able to separate truth from error and right from wrong. We may need to separate some who are criminals in order to protect society. And while an extra large pizza looks great as a whole, it is really hard to eat without dividing it up. Division itself is not always a bad thing because sometimes it's a good and necessary thing. Yet there is a great deal of evil in this world that, much like it did in the Garden of Eden, separates people from God and from one another.

There are divisions between nations, divisions in the Church, divisions in communities, in families, in marriages and in many other places wherever human beings live. Certainly there is plenty of room for legitimate differences between people, but when I speak of division, I am talking about thoughts, words, actions and attitudes that falsely separate people from God, and from one another. The greatest fuel for this kind of division comes from the sin of pride, the setting up of myself as better, more worthy, more correct, more valuable, more deserving than other people, and not even God the Lord needs to be obeyed. In this kind of thought, it's no wonder I set myself up against other people to gain an advantage over them for myself.

So how do we know what kinds of divisions are good or bad, what kind of diversity is healthy or dangerous, what types of separations are helpful or harmful? We can use logic and reason to help us decide, but even more so, we can use the guidance given to us by Christ in His Church, as Jesus says in the Gospel today that His disciples received that truth from Him.

The danger today is when we are encouraged to honor diversity in the sense of accepting some things which are morally evil and declaring them to be nothing worse than a differnt viewpoint or approach to life--or in the case of euthanasia, a different approach to death. The idea they propose to us is that by accepting morally evil philosophies and attitudes, we are turning away from the repressive and unenlightened attitudes of 2,000 years of Christian faith, and becoming instead those who want to include and embrace everyone in a spirit of brotherhood and understanding. It sounds very good, doesn't it? Being all loving and accepting. When we turn against reason, natural law and divine revelation in order to pretend that we are loving, compassionate and humane towards other people, we can be sure that we are none of the above, and instead we find ourselves cooperating with evil. If we allow ourselves to be coerced or shamed into accepting evil, then truly we should be ashamed, and we do not further the cause of unity but the cause of division--the separation of people from God and from one another.

And on one final thought, let us look to ourselves and see whether or not we are a source of unjustified division in our own homes, and with family and friends and neighbors, so that we are not putting ourselves above them, or wrongly causing separation between them. Instead, let us ask the Lord to help us see where we can truly help to heal divisions in our own lives without ever sacrificing the truth to accomplish it.