Ask a hundred Catholics what God wants from them, and most of them will get the answer right. Love God. Love your neighbor. The lawyer in today’s Gospel got it right too, and he had come to trip Jesus up. Correct answers are cheap. A man can hold that commandment in his head while his marriage goes cold, while he keeps a grudge alive for 15 years, while his prayer dries out to the point that he quietly stops bothering. The command tells you where to go, but it does not provide you with the legs to get there.

Today’s first reading names that problem before Matthew ever raises it. Ezekiel is standing in a field of skeletons, and God asks him whether they can live. Those bones are dry. Nothing remains in them to encourage, instruct, or motivate. Whatever love God commands of them, he will have to put inside them first, from the outside, into the dead thing. Saint Pius X, whose memorial the Church keeps today, understood that as well as any pope ever has. His program was three words: restore all things in Christ, and he started with the Eucharist.

The Readings

First Reading: Ezekiel 37:1-14

The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me round among them; and behold, there were very many upon the valley; and lo, they were very dry. And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord God, thou knowest.” Again he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And as I looked, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great host.

Then he said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off.’ Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you home into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken, and I have done it, says the Lord.”

Gospel: Matthew 22:34-40

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they came together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”

Scriptural Analysis

Ezekiel is a priest deported to Babylon, prophesying to a people whose city and temple are gone. The vision opens with a formula he uses repeatedly: the hand of the Lord was upon me.^[1] It shows up in Ezekiel 1:3, 3:14, 3:22, 8:1, 33:22, and 40:1, and it always means the same thing: that what follows is not the prophet’s own idea. He is carried by the Spirit and set down in “the valley,” almost certainly the same plain where he saw the glory of God in Ezekiel 3:22-23. The first time he stood there, the message was judgment. Now the Lord brings him back to the same ground and reverses it.^[2]

Look at what he actually sees. Bones on the surface, not in graves, scattered across an open plain, and very dry. Every part of that description is bad news to a Jewish reader. Leaving the dead unburied was a horror in the ancient world, and Jeremiah had already prophesied exactly this picture of Israel’s bones dragged out and left under the sun (Jeremiah 8:1-2). Behind it stands the covenant curse of Deuteronomy 28:25-26, where the corpses of a defeated Israel become food for birds. And “very dry” is worse still. The rabbis held that a residue of life remained in a man’s bones and would be the seed of his body at the resurrection; bones this dry have nothing left in them to work with.^[3] Whatever happens next has to come from outside.

So God asks the question: “Son of man, can these bones live?” The obvious answer is no. Ezekiel won’t say it. He hands the question back: “O Lord God, thou knowest.” That refusal to close the door is the hinge of the whole vision, and the prophet then becomes part of the answer. He is told to prophesy, and the word he speaks does the work. Ezekiel cooperates with God by speaking, which is a small preview of how grace usually operates in a human life.

The restoration comes in two stages, and both of them are Genesis. First, the bones knit together, sinews and flesh and skin, a body fully formed and still dead. Then Ezekiel calls the breath from the four winds. That is precisely the pattern of Genesis 2:7, where the Lord shapes a man from dust and then breathes into him. The Hebrew word ruach, which can mean breath, wind, or spirit, appears ten times in these fourteen verses, and Ezekiel plays on all three senses at once.^[4] The four winds correspond to the four directions in which the exiles have been scattered. And they stand up as “an exceedingly great host,” an army, the same word Ezekiel uses for Pharaoh’s forces in 17:17, as if Israel were being mustered in the wilderness all over again.

Then God interprets his own vision, which spares us the guesswork. The bones are the whole house of Israel, north and south, and their complaint is quoted word for word: “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off.” That is the language of despair, of a people who have stopped expecting anything. Notice that the image shifts in verse 12. Up to that point the bones lay unburied on open ground; now the Lord speaks of opening graves and raising people out of them. And the promise lands in verse 14: “I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live.” That is almost word for word Ezekiel 36:27, yesterday’s promise of a new heart and a new spirit, which tells us the dry bones vision and the new heart prophecy are one teaching in two pictures.^[5]

The Fathers split over how far to press it. Saint Jerome insists Ezekiel is speaking about the return of the exiles from Babylon, using resurrection as a parable, and adds that the parable works only because the resurrection of the dead is real: no one draws a conclusion from an idea with no basis in reality.^[6] Saint Gregory of Nyssa reads the passage as a description of the general resurrection itself, the prophet standing in spirit at the very moment the dead rise.^[7] Saint Irenaeus takes the promise plainly: that the Creator will revive our mortal bodies and open the tombs.^[8] The Church has never had to choose. The primary sense is Israel restored to her land, and the fuller sense is the Spirit raising the dead, which is why the Church reads Ezekiel 37 at the Vigil of Pentecost. The Catechism puts these prophetic promises where they belong: at the “end time” the Lord’s Spirit renews men’s hearts, engraves a new law in them, gathers the divided peoples, and transforms the first creation (CCC 715).

Now the Gospel and what happened prior to today’s reading. Jesus has just silenced the Sadducees over the resurrection, and the Pharisees regroup. Saint Thomas, following Chrysostom, reads that regrouping as shamelessness: they had every reason to be ashamed and to believe, and envy and anger kept them going instead.^[9] He also catches the tactics. They gather as a crowd but send one man to ask, so that if he loses, the rest are not humiliated, and if he wins, they all share the credit.^[10] Their coming together against the Lord echoes Psalm 2:2, where the rulers take counsel against the Lord and his anointed.

The question is a trap with real teeth. Later rabbis counted 613 precepts in the Torah, 248 positive and 365 negative, and they argued about which were “heavy” and which were “light.”^[11] Since all of God’s commands are great, Saint Thomas notes, naming one invites an objection from any of the others.^[12] Jesus answers with two verses every devout Jew already knew. Deuteronomy 6:5, from the Shema, prayed several times a day, and Leviticus 19:18. Matthew’s version says heart, soul, and mind, using dianoia where the Septuagint has “strength.”^[13] The originality is in the joining. Hillel had summarized the whole Torah negatively, that what is hateful to you, you should not do to your neighbor.^[14] Jesus states it positively and binds love of neighbor to love of God as an equal.

Saint Thomas presses on the word “greatest.” The first commandment is greatest in comprehension, because love of neighbor is already contained inside it, since whoever loves God loves his brother (1 John 4:21). It is first in origin and in dignity, though not first in the order of Scripture, where the first word is that the Lord our God is one Lord (Deuteronomy 6:4).^[15] The second is “like it” because man is made in the likeness of God, so that when a man is loved, God is loved in him.^[16] And he reads “as yourself” as a statement about the end rather than the quantity. You love yourself rightly only for God’s sake, and you are to love your neighbor on those same terms, willing him the good of righteousness. Loving him in the identical measure you love yourself would overturn the order of charity.^[17]

Then Jesus says everything hangs on these two. The Greek verb is krematai, from a Hebrew image of a great weight suspended by two ropes.^[18] Saint Thomas explains why the weight holds: in the order of action, the end governs everything, the way first principles govern every conclusion in a science. Since charity is the end of the commandment (1 Timothy 1:5), every other precept depends on it.^[19]

Put the two readings side by side and you have a question and an answer. The lawyer asks what God requires. Jesus tells him: everything you have, poured out toward God and toward the man next to you. Ezekiel tells us where that comes from. “I will put my Spirit within you.” Saint Paul says the same thing without the metaphor: God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Romans 5:5), and the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to our mortal bodies too (Romans 8:11). On Easter evening the risen Christ breathed on the apostles and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22), which is Genesis 2:7 and Ezekiel 37 happening in one room.

Daily Application

Here is the honest examination for today. Think of the one relationship where charity has gone dry on you. Maybe it’s a brother you haven’t spoken to since your mother’s funeral. Maybe it’s a spouse you’re perfectly polite to and no longer warm toward. Maybe it’s God himself, and prayer has become a duty you perform with your coat on, standing near the door. You already know the commandment. You’ve known it since second grade. Knowing it has not moved you an inch.

The temptation at that point is to grit your teeth and try harder, and I understand it, because trying harder feels like virtue. But you cannot squeeze charity out of yourself by force any more than a skeleton can decide to stand up. Charity is a gift infused by the Holy Spirit, which means the first move today is to ask for it. Take that specific dry place, name it out loud in prayer, and say something like: Lord, I do not love this person, and I cannot make myself. Put your Spirit in me. Prophesy over your own bones and mean it. That prayer is humiliating, which is exactly why it works, because it puts you in the position Ezekiel took when he refused to answer his own question and handed it back to God.

Then go where the Spirit is actually given. Saint Pius X is the pope for this, and his instincts were pastoral before they were theoretical. He was the second of 10 children in a poor family in Riese, and he never lost the habit of speaking plainly: “I was born poor, I lived poor, I will die poor.” When he looked at a Europe drifting away from Christ, his answer was to open the sacraments wider. In 1905 he pushed for frequent, even daily, reception of Holy Communion, and in 1910 he lowered the age of First Communion so that children could receive the Lord as soon as they could tell the Eucharist from ordinary bread. That was a man who had read Ezekiel correctly. A dried-up Church recovers when God’s own life is put back inside her people, one soul at a time, at the Communion rail and in the confessional. Good advice from the pulpit has never raised anybody.

So do both today. Ask, and then receive. Go to Mass if you can, and go to confession this week if it has been a while, because grudges and coldness both feed on unconfessed sin. And when you receive Communion, bring that one dry relationship with you and hold it in front of the Lord for the two minutes afterward when he is closest to you. You will not feel like an exceedingly great host. Ezekiel’s bones did not feel like one either, right up until the moment they stood.

Ask him for the Spirit today, and then let him do what only he can do.

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Notes

1. Daniel A. Keating, Ezekiel, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2024), 257. ↩
2. Ibid., 257. ↩
3. Ibid., 257n2. ↩
4. Ibid., 258-59. ↩
5. Ibid., 259-60. ↩
6. Saint Jerome, Commentarii in Ezechielem 37.1ff., quoted in The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, ed. James Gavigan, Brian McCarthy, and Thomas McGovern (Dublin: Four Courts Press; New York: Scepter, 2005), 743. ↩
7. Saint Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, quoted in Keating, Ezekiel, 258. ↩
8. Saint Irenaeus, Adversus haereses 5.15.1, quoted in The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, 743. ↩
9. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, chap. 22, lect. 4, no. 1807. ↩
10. Ibid., no. 1809. ↩
11. Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 315. ↩
12. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, chap. 22, lect. 4, no. 1811. ↩
13. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, 315. ↩
14. Ibid., 316, citing b. Šabbat 31a. ↩
15. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, chap. 22, lect. 4, no. 1815. ↩
16. Ibid., no. 1817. ↩
17. Ibid., no. 1819. ↩
18. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, 315. ↩
19. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, chap. 22, lect. 4, no. 1820. ↩

Books Cited

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• Daniel A. Keating, Ezekiel, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2024)
• University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2005)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew 13-28, Latin-English Opera Omnia (The Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic)
• Daniel J. Harrington, SJ, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Liturgical Press)