In Ezekiel’s vision, God sends a man in linen through Jerusalem with a writing case, and the only people spared the sword are the ones who “sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it” (Ezekiel 9:4). They fixed nothing in that city. They were spared because the wickedness around them still grieved them. That’s a frightening standard, because the surest sign that sin has gotten into us is that it stops bothering us. We call the numbness tolerance, or minding our own business, or not being judgmental, and it saves us the cost of ever saying a hard thing to someone we love. Then Jesus takes that grief and turns it into an assignment: go to him, alone, and tell him. Today the Church gives us Jane Frances de Chantal, a widow who let Francis de Sales tell her hard things for years, and who then spent her life doing the same for other women.

The Readings

First Reading: Ezekiel 9:1-7; 10:18-22

Then he cried in my ears with a loud voice, saying, “Draw near, you executioners of the city, each with his destroying weapon in his hand.” And lo, six men came from the direction of the upper gate, which faces north, every man with his weapon for slaughter in his hand, and with them was a man clothed in linen, with a writing case at his side. And they went in and stood beside the bronze altar. Now the glory of the God of Israel had gone up from the cherubim on which it rested to the threshold of the house; and he called to the man clothed in linen, who had the writing case at his side. And the Lord said to him, “Go through the city, through Jerusalem, and put a mark upon the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it.” And to the others he said in my hearing, “Pass through the city after him, and smite; your eye shall not spare, and you shall show no pity; slay old men outright, young men and maidens, little children and women, but touch no one upon whom is the mark. And begin at my sanctuary.” So they began with the elders who were before the house. Then he said to them, “Defile the house, and fill the courts with the slain. Go forth.” So they went forth, and smote in the city.

Then the glory of the Lord went forth from the threshold of the house, and stood over the cherubim. And the cherubim lifted up their wings and mounted up from the earth in my sight as they went forth, with the wheels beside them; and they stood at the door of the east gate of the house of the Lord; and the glory of the God of Israel was over them. These were the living creatures that I saw underneath the God of Israel by the river Chebar; and I knew that they were cherubim. Each had four faces, and each four wings, and underneath their wings the semblance of human hands. And as for the likeness of their faces, they were the very faces whose appearance I had seen by the river Chebar. They went every one straight forward.

Gospel: Matthew 18:15-20

“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

Scriptural Analysis

Ezekiel is still inside the great vision that began in chapter 8, when he was carried in spirit to Jerusalem and shown what was actually going on inside the temple: elders burning incense to carved animals in a hidden chamber, women weeping for Tammuz at the north gate, 25 men at the entrance of the sanctuary with their backs to the holy place, worshiping the sun. Chapter 9 is the answer to all of it. Ezekiel is teaching theology with images here, and every one of them is deliberate, which is why the chapter reads less like a battlefield report than like a liturgy of judgment.^[1]

Count the men. Six come with weapons for slaughter, and a seventh walks among them clothed in linen, which is priestly dress (Exodus 28:42; Leviticus 16:4). Seven is the number of completeness, and the one in charge is a priest, which tells you the whole operation is carried out at God’s command rather than by an enemy who slipped past him.^[2] They come from the north, the road the Assyrian and Babylonian armies always took into the land. Ezekiel is looking at Nebuchadnezzar’s army and calling it a weapon in God’s hand.

Then the man in linen is given the mark. In Hebrew it is a tau, the last letter of the alphabet, and in the old script that letter was written as a cross. The Fathers could not leave that alone. Jerome preserves a comment of Origen that some read the tau as the sign of the perfect, some as the sign of those who kept the Torah, and some as the sign of those who believe in Christ, “because the taw takes the form of a cross, the sign with which all Christians are marked at their baptism.”^[3] Maximus of Turin says the same thing plainly: the ones signed with the letter tau, the mark of the cross, walked out of that city alive.^[4] So the reading is already sacramental. The mark that saves is a cross traced on a forehead, which is exactly what happened to you and to me.

But watch who receives it. The mark goes on the foreheads of those who “sigh and groan” over the abominations, which is a strange qualification for survival. God passes over the reformers and the respectable and looks for the ones whose hearts were still breaking. Augustine takes that up and moves it inward. There is a forehead of the face and a forehead of the conscience, he says, and it makes a great deal of difference where a man carries the sign of Christ, on the forehead alone or on the forehead and in the heart. These people did not stop the sins committed around them, “but at least they were pained by them, and by their very pain they set themselves apart.”^[5] Grief over evil, when it is real, is already a kind of separation from it. That’s why it can be marked.

The judgment then does something we would rather it didn’t. “Begin at my sanctuary,” God says, and they begin with the elders standing in front of the temple. Jerome says these are the priests who came to the temple and adored idols, or who were called holy among the people because of their office and nothing more, and he hears 1 Peter 4:17 underneath it: the time has come for judgment to begin at the household of God.^[6] Office does not shelter anyone. If anything, it exposes you first. I take that personally, and every deacon and priest reading this should.

Then the worst thing in the whole vision happens quietly. The glory of the Lord lifts off the threshold, settles over the cherubim, and moves out to the east gate, and it goes. Ezekiel keeps naming every detail: the wheels, the wings, the four faces, the same sapphire brightness he saw by the river Chebar, and the accumulation of detail is the point. He is watching, item by item, God leave the house.^[7] The temple’s ruin at Babylonian hands is the visible part. The real catastrophe is that the Presence walked out first, and the people never noticed, because they had already decided “the Lord has forsaken the land, and the Lord does not see” (Ezekiel 9:9). Jerome puts his finger on that verse: the cause of so many crimes is that the people stopped believing God was watching anything at all.^[8]

Ezekiel does the one thing a prophet is supposed to do. He falls on his face and begs (Ezekiel 9:8), the way Moses did (Exodus 32:11-14), and Abraham did over Sodom (Genesis 18:16-32).^[9] Chrysostom notes that the just always grieve for other people, not only for themselves, and that God gives a large reward for that grief even when it does not save the one you’re grieving over.^[10] Hold that next to the Gospel, because Jesus is about to tell us what to do with it.

Matthew 18 is the discourse on life inside the Church, and it comes right after the lost sheep. The Father goes out after the one that wandered off; now Jesus tells his disciples to do the same thing with their feet. “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone.” The three stages that follow, private word, then witnesses, then the church, are not a procedure for petty grievances. The fact that the man may not come back without intervention, and that the whole community eventually gets involved, tells you Jesus is talking about grave sin.^[11]

The Greek behind “tell him his fault” means to lay something open, to uncover it. The aim is that he finally sees what he has done.^[12] Aquinas is blunt about the tone: rebuke him, he says, don’t upbraid him or exasperate him, and be brief about it.^[13] He also explains why Jesus insists on doing it alone first. This correction comes out of charity, and charity has to protect two things at once, the man’s conscience and his good name. Conscience outranks reputation when they conflict. But if you can save both, you must, and going to him privately is how. Drag his sin into public, and you often make him shameless instead of sorry, and then he throws away everything.^[14]

Which raises the question most of us are quietly hoping nobody asks. Is it a sin to say nothing? Aquinas answers with Augustine: “if you do not rebuke, you are made worse by keeping silent than that man by sinning.”^[15] He allows real exceptions, and they’re pastoral ones. If you have good reason to think the correction will harden him rather than help him, hold off. If it would bring persecution on the Church, hold off. But if you stay silent to protect your comfort, your reputation, or your Thanksgiving dinner, Aquinas says you sin.^[16] The whole thing is rooted in the law: “you shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason with your neighbor” (Leviticus 19:17). Correction and hatred are opposites in Scripture. The failure to speak is what gets classified as hatred.^[17]

Aquinas adds the motive test, and it’s the one that catches me. If you correct him for your own sake, to win the argument or to be proved right, you have done nothing meritorious. If you correct him for God, it counts. And the promised outcome tells you what you were after all along: “you have gained your brother.”^[18] The word is gained, the same word a shepherd would use about a sheep he carried home.

Then come the two verses everyone quotes without their context. “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven” was given to Peter alone in Matthew 16:19; here it is handed to the disciples as a body, and it concerns the standing of unrepentant members of the community, decisions that heaven backs.^[19] And “where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” belongs first to this business of reclaiming a sinner, long before it belongs to a Wednesday night prayer group. The prayer of verse 19 stands underneath the binding and loosing of verse 18.^[20] Rabbinic tradition said the divine presence rests on two who sit together over the Torah. Jesus says the gathering point is his own name, and he himself is the Presence there, the Emmanuel of Matthew 1:23 who promises at the end of the Gospel to be with us to the close of the age (Matthew 28:20).^[21]

Now put the two readings side by side. In Ezekiel the glory leaves the house. In Matthew Christ promises to stand in the middle of two or three who gather in his name to go after a brother who is drifting away. The Presence that walked out the east gate has come back, and it locates itself precisely where his people are trying to save each other.

Daily Application

Start where Ezekiel starts, because you can’t skip to the correcting. The mark went on the people whom evil still grieved. So the first question today is whether the sin around you, and the sin in you, still registers as sin at all. Courage to confront somebody comes later, and it’s useless without this. Numbness is the cheapest sin to acquire and the hardest to notice, and it comes on slowly, usually through a screen, one small compromise of the conscience at a time until nothing lands anymore. Ask yourself when you last felt real grief over something evil, and whether you have quietly begun assuming, like the men in chapter 9, that God is not looking anyway.

If that grief is still alive in you, Jesus tells you exactly where to take it: to the man himself, alone. Almost everything we call concern for someone turns out on inspection to be talking about them, and Jesus closes that road off. Say it in a way that lays the thing open instead of tearing him down. Aquinas would have you check your motive on the way there, and it’s worth being honest, because the desire to correct and the desire to win feel nearly identical from the inside. If what you want at the end of the conversation is to have been right, stay home and pray until you want him back instead.

And do it privately, for his sake. Protecting a man’s reputation while you go after his conscience is one of the most underrated works of mercy in the Christian life. It costs you the satisfaction of being seen doing the right thing. That’s the price, and it’s the point.

This is where today’s saint has something to say. Jane Frances de Chantal was 32, a widow with four surviving children, living under a father-in-law who was vain and fierce and whose housekeeper treated her with contempt, when she met Francis de Sales. She wanted to enter religious life immediately. He told her to wait. She waited, for years, under his direction, and she let him soften the harsh penances an earlier director had loaded on her. That’s the unglamorous half of fraternal correction: being on the receiving end of it, from someone who has earned the right to say hard things and who says them gently. She did not found the Visitation until she was 45. Then came the losses that would have finished most people: Francis de Sales dead, her son killed, plague through France, her daughter-in-law and son-in-law gone, and long stretches of interior darkness and spiritual dryness in her own prayer. She spent the plague years emptying her convent’s resources into the care of the sick.

That’s what makes her the right saint for this Gospel. The woman who is safe to correct you is the one who has already been corrected, and who has suffered enough to have no interest in humiliating anybody. If you want to be able to say a hard thing to your brother, start by letting someone say one to you. Find a confessor who knows you and go regularly enough that he can actually tell you the truth. Ask your spouse what you’re blind to and then don’t argue with the answer.

Then take the promise seriously. Before you go to your brother, get someone to pray with you for him, because that’s the order Jesus lays down: the praying of verse 19 stands under the going of verse 15. And when two of you agree in his name over a soul that’s slipping, Christ is standing in the room. The glory that walked out of Ezekiel’s temple has taken up residence among people who are trying to bring one another home. Go get your brother.

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Notes

1. The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, commentary on Ezekiel 9:1-11 and 10:1-22 (Dublin: Four Courts Press). ↩
2. The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, commentary on Ezekiel 9:1-11 and 10:1-22 (Dublin: Four Courts Press). ↩
3. Origen, Selecta in Ezechielem 9, recorded by Jerome and quoted in The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, commentary on Ezekiel 9:1-11. ↩
4. Maximus of Turin, Sermon 45.2, in Kenneth Stevenson and Michael Glerup, eds., Ezekiel, Daniel, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament XIII (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 36. ↩
5. Augustine, Sermon 107.7, in Stevenson and Glerup, Ezekiel, Daniel, 35-36. ↩
6. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel 3.9.4-6, in Stevenson and Glerup, Ezekiel, Daniel, 36. ↩
7. The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, commentary on Ezekiel 9:1-11 and 10:1-22 (Dublin: Four Courts Press). ↩
8. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel 3.9.9-10, in Stevenson and Glerup, Ezekiel, Daniel, 37. ↩
9. The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, commentary on Ezekiel 9:8. ↩
10. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 25.12 and 29.7, in Stevenson and Glerup, Ezekiel, Daniel, 37. ↩
11. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 231, commentary on Matthew 18:15-17. ↩
12. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 231, commentary on Matthew 18:15-17. ↩
13. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, chap. 18, lect. 2, no. 1516. ↩
14. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, chap. 18, lect. 2, no. 1518. ↩
15. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, chap. 18, lect. 2, no. 1517, quoting Augustine. ↩
16. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, chap. 18, lect. 2, no. 1517, quoting Augustine. ↩
17. Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 269, note on Matthew 18:15. ↩
18. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, chap. 18, lect. 2, no. 1519. ↩
19. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 232, commentary on Matthew 18:18. ↩
20. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 232, commentary on Matthew 18:19-20. ↩
21. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 232-33, commentary on Matthew 18:19-20; Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, 269, note on Matthew 18:20. ↩