Jesus says all of this standing inside the temple. That detail carries the whole passage. The men he indicts had spent their working lives closer to the holy place than anyone else in Israel, and what occupied them was the width of a prayer box and who got the good seat at dinner. Ezekiel saw the glory of God come back through the east gate and fell on his face. These men lived in the building and never looked up.

That gap belongs to us too, because proximity is exactly what Catholics have. The Eucharist a few blocks away. A confessional open Saturday afternoon. A rosary in the console of the car. The nearer a holy thing sits, the easier it becomes to treat it as furniture, and from there it’s a short walk to wearing it. Religion performed for an audience is still religion, which is what makes it so hard to catch in yourself.

Today the Church crowns a woman almost nobody watched. Read the last line of the Gospel, then read the calendar, and see what those two things do to each other.

The Readings

First Reading: Ezekiel 43:1-7ab

Afterward he brought me to the gate, the gate facing east. And behold, the glory of the God of Israel came from the east; and the sound of his coming was like the sound of many waters; and the earth shone with his glory. And the vision I saw was like the vision which I had seen when he came to destroy the city, and like the vision which I had seen by the river Chebar; and I fell upon my face. As the glory of the Lord entered the temple by the gate facing east, the Spirit lifted me up, and brought me into the inner court; and behold, the glory of the Lord filled the temple.

While the man was standing beside me, I heard one speaking to me out of the temple; and he said to me, “Son of man, this is the place of my throne and the place of the soles of my feet, where I will dwell in the midst of the people of Israel for ever.”

Gospel: Matthew 23:1-12

Then said Jesus to the crowds and to his disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do; for they preach, but do not practice. They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with their finger. They do all their deeds to be seen by men; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues, and salutations in the market places, and being called rabbi by men. But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brethren. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Neither be called masters, for you have one master, the Christ. He who is greatest among you shall be your servant; whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”

Scriptural Analysis

The Glory Comes Home

Everything in the book of Ezekiel has been running toward this moment.^[1] The prophet is a deportee living by the river Chebar in Babylon, and the worst thing he has ever seen is the thing he watched in chapters 10 and 11: the glory of the Lord lifting off the temple, pausing at the east gate, and leaving the city to its fate. Jerusalem fell. The building burned. For a Jew of the exile, that departure was the theological catastrophe behind the political one. God had walked out.

So when the angelic guide finishes measuring the new temple in chapters 40 through 42 and then brings Ezekiel back to the gate facing east, the reader already knows what that gate means. The glory returns by the same road it took when it left.^[2] The sound is like many waters. The earth shines. And Ezekiel does what he did the first time he saw the chariot throne: he falls on his face.

Then the Spirit picks him up and carries him into the inner court, and he testifies to what he sees. The glory of the Lord filled the temple. Ezekiel deliberately echoes two earlier scenes: the cloud filling the tabernacle in the wilderness (Exodus 40:34-35) and the cloud filling Solomon’s temple at its dedication (1 Kings 8:10-11).^[3] Each time, God moves in only after the dwelling has been prepared for him. Here the preparation happened in a vision, which is its own kind of promise.

Now the voice. “Son of man, this is the place of my throne and the place of the soles of my feet.” God has no feet. He is speaking in the old temple language of Israel, where the sanctuary is the Lord’s throne and its floor his footstool. The psalmist tells the faithful to worship at his footstool (Psalm 99:5; 132:7). What makes Ezekiel’s version striking is that the ark of the covenant, the throne’s traditional seat, never appears anywhere in his temple. Jeremiah had already prophesied that nobody would speak of the ark again, because Jerusalem herself would be called the throne of the Lord (Jeremiah 3:16-17).^[4] The Lord takes his seat in the middle of his people, with no furniture in between.

And the promise has a hook. Read on past today’s citation, and the sentence continues: the house of Israel shall no more defile my holy name. The permanent presence and the required holiness arrive in the same breath. God dwelling in the middle of a people makes a claim on how that people lives. Saint Columbanus put the principle plainly: “The God we seek is never far from us, because he dwells within us if we are worthy of his presence.”^[5]

Catholic readers should feel the floor shift under this passage, because the Word made flesh takes it up directly. When John says the Word “dwelt among us” (John 1:14), the Greek verb he chooses comes from the word for tent, and it is a close cousin of the verb used in the Greek Ezekiel for God’s dwelling in verses 7 and 9.^[6] The soles of God’s feet did touch the ground. In a way Ezekiel could not have guessed, the throne and the footstool turned out to be a body. That is why the last book of the Bible can describe the city of God with no temple in it at all, because the Lord God and the Lamb are the temple (Revelation 21:22).

One more thread that runs straight into today’s feast. In the very next chapter, Ezekiel is brought back to that eastern gate and finds it shut, permanently, because the Lord God of Israel entered by it. The Fathers of the Church, Saint Jerome among them, read that sealed gate as a figure of the virginity of Mary: the dwelling place the Son of God entered without breaking the entrance, a reading the Roman Catechism later gathered up with the other Marian prophecies.^[7] The glory of God came home to Israel through a gate on the east side of a temple. He came home to the human race through her.

The Chair And The Costume

Matthew 23 is the last act of the long fight between Jesus and Israel’s leadership, and here the arguing stops and the denunciation starts.^[8] It happens in the temple precincts, a few days before the Passion.

He opens with a concession that surprises people: the scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so do what they tell you. That seat may have been an actual stone chair set at the front of later synagogues for whoever presided at the weekly liturgy, though the archaeological evidence is thin and late; it works best as a figure for the teaching and ruling authority these men held in the Jewish community.^[9] The law of Moses was read every Sabbath (Acts 15:21), and somebody had to hand it on. Jesus honors the office and buries the men holding it. Saint Thomas Aquinas draws the line exactly: their doctrine should be heeded, and their life should be avoided.^[10]

Then the charge sheet. They bind heavy burdens and lay them on other people’s shoulders, and will not move those burdens with a finger. Aquinas takes that verse apart into four failures, and it is worth slowing down for. There is presumption, because they pile new observances on top of the precepts God actually gave. There is cruelty, since Scripture says God’s commandments are not heavy (1 John 5:3) and Jesus says his own yoke is easy (Matthew 11:30). There is a lack of judgment, because a heavy load on a strong man is nothing, while these loads land on the weak. And there is severity, since they impose without mercy. Worst of all, they will not lift a finger, which Aquinas reads as refusing even to begin.^[11]

The phylacteries and the tassels deserve a word, since both of them are obedience. Phylacteries were small leather boxes holding Scripture texts, strapped to the forehead and the arm at prayer in obedience to Deuteronomy 6:8 and 11:18. The long fringes came from Numbers 15:38-39, worn as a visible reminder of the commandments. Jesus wore tassels himself (Matthew 9:20; 14:36) and answered to “Rabbi” without complaint (Matthew 26:25, 49).^[12] The sin is in the widening and the lengthening, in calibrating a devotion so that it registers with an audience.

Aquinas asks the obvious question: why do these men talk and not act? Because they are incorrigible, and what makes a man incorrigible is that he is seeking his own glory. Then he quotes Saint John Chrysostom with a line that should be pinned inside every sacristy in the country: “Take away vainglory from a cleric, and you will cut off all other vices without labor.”^[13]

That brings us to the titles. Rabbi, father, master. Catholics get pressed on verse 9 constantly, and the answer is old and solid. The earliest Christians plainly did not hear a ban on a word. Stephen and Paul both address Jewish crowds as “Brothers and fathers” (Acts 7:2; 22:1). Paul tells the Corinthians he became their father in Christ Jesus through the gospel (1 Corinthians 4:15). The desert monks were called Father, and the great teachers of the early centuries are still the Church Fathers.^[14] What Jesus forbids is the appetite: the man who wants the honor of the title, who wants to be esteemed in a way that competes with the Father in heaven and with the one Teacher.

Aquinas explains what “one is your teacher” actually means, and he does it with a doctor’s image. Properly speaking, a teacher is someone who holds the doctrine from himself. By that standard, God alone teaches, and everyone else teaches by ministry, handing on what he was handed. Think of a physician. He administers remedies from the outside, but nature does the healing. The teacher supplies aids from the outside, and God alone works in the intellect.^[15] Every catechist, professor, and deacon in the world is a man handing out remedies. The healing is not his.

And then the two lines that close the passage and open today’s feast. The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. When Aquinas reaches the last verse, he reaches for the Magnificat: “he has put down the mighty from their seat, and has exalted the humble” (Luke 1:52).^[16] The woman who sang that line is the proof of it.

Daily Application

Start where Chrysostom starts, because he is right about the order. Vainglory is the hinge the other vices swing on, and a man who works it loose finds the rest coming off without much effort. So today’s question goes underneath the commandments to your motive for keeping them. Could you keep them with the lights off?

Here is a test that costs nothing and tells the truth. Think of the best thing you did in the last month. Now ask what it would have felt like if nobody ever found out. If the answer is that you would have done it anyway and slept fine, thank God. If the answer stings a little, you have found something worth bringing to confession, and you are in enormous company. The scribes in this Gospel were not cynics. Most of them believed every word they taught. That is the terrifying part. A man can hold the faith with real conviction and still be running the whole operation for the reaction it gets, and he will usually be the last to notice.

The interior movement this Gospel asks for is a willingness to let your best work go unwitnessed. That is harder than fasting. It means doing the 2 a.m. shift with a sick child and never telling anyone at work. It means giving in ways that never show up on a list. It means correcting a fault in yourself that nobody else could see and therefore nobody else will applaud. Jesus already told us who is watching: your Father who sees in secret (Matthew 6:4). Believing that in the moment is an act of faith, and it is the specific act of faith today’s readings are asking of you.

Which is why the Church puts the Queenship of Mary on this day, on the eighth day after the Assumption, as the crown on that feast. Almost nothing Mary did was seen. Scripture gives her no sermon and no seat of honor. She kept things and pondered them in her heart, which is the reverse of widening a phylactery. Pope Pius XII, who established this feast in 1954, grounded her title in what she is: Mother of God, joined to her Son’s redemptive work as the New Eve, perfect in holiness, powerful in intercession.^[17] She is the sealed gate of Ezekiel’s vision, the dwelling God chose for himself, and today she wears a crown for the reason verse 12 gives. Whoever humbles himself will be exalted. God keeps that promise literally, and Mary is the evidence sitting in plain sight.

You will not be crowned Queen of Heaven. You will get something better than applause, which is the attention of the God who came back through the east gate and asked for a place to set his feet. Give him one. Do the next good thing where nobody can see it, and let the Father do the crowning.

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Notes

1. Daniel A. Keating, Ezekiel, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2024), 298. ↩
2. The Navarre Bible, Old Testament prophetic books volume, commentary on Ezekiel 43:1-12 (Dublin: Four Courts Press; New York: Scepter Publishers, 2005), 765. ↩
3. Keating, Ezekiel, 299. ↩
4. Keating, Ezekiel, 300. ↩
5. Saint Columbanus, Instructiones 1, 3, quoted in The Navarre Bible, commentary on Ezekiel 43:1-12, 766. ↩
6. Keating, Ezekiel, 301. ↩
7. The Navarre Bible, commentary on Ezekiel 44:1-3, 769, citing Saint Jerome, Epistolae 48, 21, and the Roman Catechism I, 4, 10. ↩
8. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 291. ↩
9. Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 320. ↩
10. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, trans. Jeremy Holmes (Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2013), no. 1837. ↩
11. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, no. 1840. ↩
12. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 292. ↩
13. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, no. 1842. ↩
14. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 293. ↩
15. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, nos. 1848-1849. ↩
16. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, no. 1855. ↩
17. Pius XII, Ad Caeli Reginam (1954). ↩

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, 2005)
• Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2010)
• Daniel J. Harrington, SJ, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Liturgical Press)
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, Latin-English Opera Omnia (The Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic)