Go And Tell Him

Somewhere along the way we decided that the kindest thing you can do for a person in sin is to say nothing. We call it respect. We call it minding our own business. Ezekiel calls it something else: blood on your hands (Ezekiel 33:8). That’s a hard line for a Sunday morning, but it exposes what our silence usually is. Most of the time I’m quiet about a brother’s sin because speaking would cost me something: an awkward conversation, a friendship, my reputation as the easygoing one. I’ve dressed up self-protection as humility. Today’s Gospel refuses that trade. Jesus tells you to go, alone, and tell your brother his fault, and he gives the reason in 5 words: “you have gained your brother” (Matthew 18:15). The person you’ve been avoiding is someone Christ counts as family, and he’s asking you to go get him back.

The Readings

First Reading: Ezekiel 33:7-9

“So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, O wicked man, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way; he shall die in his iniquity, but you will have saved your life.

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

Chapter 33 is the hinge of the book of Ezekiel. Everything before it is judgment: the oracles against Jerusalem, the temple abandoned by God’s glory, the siege. Everything after it is hope: the dry bones, the new heart, the river flowing from the restored temple. And right at the joint, as a fugitive arrives with the news that the city has fallen (Ezekiel 33:21), the Lord repeats to Ezekiel the very words of his original call: “I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel” (Ezekiel 3:17). The two watchman passages bracket the prophet’s whole ministry of warning.^[1]

The image is military. A city under threat posts a man on the wall. If he sees the enemy coming and blows the trumpet, anyone who ignores the blast dies on his own account. But if the watchman sees the sword and stays silent, the people still die, and God says, “his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand” (Ezekiel 33:6). Ezekiel had used the same figure back in chapter 3, but there he was told to warn both the righteous and the wicked. Here only the wicked are named. The Navarre commentators read that shift as a sign of the new stage: after the catastrophe of 587, the ones who need the warning are the ones still walking toward death.^[2]

Notice what the passage does and doesn’t put on the watchman. He’s responsible for sounding the alarm, and only for that. Whether anyone listens is on the listener. “If you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way; he shall die in his iniquity, but you will have saved your life” (Ezekiel 33:9). Daniel Keating points out that by restating the call at the very moment the city falls, the Lord is quietly commending Ezekiel. He did his job. The people didn’t turn, and so Jerusalem burned, but the prophet’s hands are clean.^[3] That distinction matters for anyone who has ever said the hard thing to a friend and watched it go nowhere.

The Fathers took the watchman personally, because they were watchmen. Jerome says the watchman of the house of Israel can be read as a king or a prophet, but the watchman of the Church is the bishop or the presbyter, chosen to read the Scriptures, see what’s coming, and correct what’s wrong. Augustine preached on this very text and asked his people, “Do you see how dangerous it is to keep silent?” The sinner dies in his own sin, and the watchman who said nothing is justly condemned alongside him. Gregory of Nazianzus, who fled his own ordination for a time, wrote that Ezekiel’s injunction to the watchmen haunted him: silence about vice profits neither the watchman nor the sinner.^[4] So when Augustine’s biographer Possidius wanted to sum up the bishop of Hippo’s life, he reached for this chapter. Augustine “thought of himself as a watchman set by the Lord over the house of Israel,” preaching in season and out of season.^[5]

That’s the Old Testament half. The Gospel takes the watchman’s trumpet and puts it in every disciple’s hands.

Matthew 18 is the discourse on life inside the Church. Jesus has just told the parable of the lost sheep: the shepherd who leaves the 99 to go after the one that wandered, because “it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish” (Matthew 18:14). Then, without a break, he says, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault.” Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri are right to read verses 15 through 20 as the continuation of that shepherd’s heart: this is what seeking the lost looks like when the lost sheep is the guy in the next pew.^[6]

Jesus lays out 3 stages. First, go alone. The Greek verb behind “tell him his fault” (elegxon) means to lay something open, to bring it into the light, and it comes straight out of Leviticus 19:17: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason with your neighbor, lest you bear sin because of him.” Scripture treats the refusal to correct as a form of hatred. Second, if he won’t listen, bring one or two others, “that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses,” which is the rule of evidence from Deuteronomy 19:15. Third, tell it to the church, and if he refuses even the church, “let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” Daniel Harrington notes that the Essene community at Qumran had a nearly identical procedure: reprove privately, then before witnesses, then before the assembly. First-century Jews knew that a community which never corrects its members won’t stay a community for long.^[7]

Two details deserve attention. The word “church” (ekklesia) appears in only two places in the Gospels, here and in Matthew 16:18, where Jesus builds his Church on Peter. There he speaks of the universal Church; here of the local assembly. And the authority he promised Peter, to bind and to loose, he now extends to the disciples as a body (Matthew 18:18). In the Jewish idiom of the day, binding and loosing covered both authoritative teaching and the power to include or exclude someone from the community. Origen even noticed that when Jesus speaks to Peter he says “in the heavens,” plural, while here he says “in heaven,” and read the difference as a sign that Peter’s power is universal and the others’ is local. Whatever we make of that detail, the structure is plain: the Church’s judgment on an unrepentant sinner carries heaven’s authority, and the whole process, even the final exclusion, exists to wake the man up and bring him home (compare 1 Corinthians 5:1-5).^[8]

St. Thomas Aquinas, lecturing on this chapter, asks the questions a thoughtful Catholic still asks. Is it a sin to skip the correction? He answers with Augustine: if you don’t rebuke, “you are made worse by keeping silent than that man by sinning.” Why alone first? Because correction is an act of charity, and charity wants two things for the brother: a clean conscience and an intact good name. If you can win the first without wrecking the second, you must. Thomas even observes, with a realism that sounds like a parish confessor, that a man whose sin is broadcast often becomes shameless and throws himself into every sin. What tone? “Rebuke, not upbraid, or irritate; and make it clear briefly.” And what’s the goal? Thomas gives 3 reasons for the phrase “you will gain your brother”: so you know that correction done for your own satisfaction earns nothing; so you remember that he is a fellow member of one body; and so you understand that in saving him you save yourself, since “he who causes a sinner to be converted from the error of his way, will save his soul from death” (James 5:20). He adds one more line worth memorizing: a man can be excommunicated only for stubbornness. The Church’s sternest penalty is reserved for the refusal to listen, which is a different thing from sin.^[9]

Then comes the promise everybody loves and few of us read in context. “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). We put it on banners for prayer meetings, and the Catechism does teach that Christ is truly present in his Church’s common prayer (Catechism 1373). But look at what surrounds it. The “two or three” are the witnesses of verse 16. The prayer of verse 19 is a prayer for the erring brother and for wisdom about how to deal with him. The rabbis said that where two sit together over the words of the Law, the divine presence rests between them. Jesus says that where his disciples gather in his name, even for the painful work of correcting a brother, he himself is there. Mitch and Sri connect this to the name given him at the start of the Gospel, Emmanuel, God with us, and to his last words at its end, “I am with you always” (Matthew 1:23; 28:20).^[10] The hardest conversation you’ll have this year, if you have it in his name, is a place where Christ has promised to stand.

The second reading, which we heard between these two, ties the knot: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another… love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:8, 10). The Catechism lists fraternal correction among the things charity demands (Catechism 1829). It’s what love does when the beloved is walking toward a cliff.

Daily Application

Here’s the movement these readings ask of you. First, admit that your silence has a motive. None of us stays quiet about a friend’s affair, a son’s drift from the sacraments, a coworker’s cruelty, out of pure respect for their freedom. We stay quiet because speaking is expensive and silence is free, at least for us. Ezekiel says it’s not free. Somebody pays, and if the watchman won’t pay with his comfort, the sinner pays with his life. That’s meant to unsettle you a little. Let it.

Second, remember the goal, because it changes everything about how you speak. Thomas says if you correct to get something off your chest, you’ve done nothing. The only reason to open your mouth is to gain your brother. That single purpose rules out the text message sent in anger, the comment made in front of the group, the “I’m just being honest” that’s really just being cruel. Go alone. Go briefly. Go the way you’d want someone to come to you. And go having prayed first, because Jesus put the promise of his presence right there, in the middle of the procedure, for people who are scared to death of the conversation.

Third, hand the outcome to God. The watchman blows the trumpet; he doesn’t make anyone run for the gate. If you’ve spoken the truth in love and your brother shrugs, Ezekiel would tell you that you’ve saved your own soul. And the Church’s whole ladder of correction, up to and including her sternest discipline, exists to keep the door open for the day he turns around. So do you. You bring witnesses, you bring the Church, you keep praying, and you never let a refused correction curdle into contempt.

Franciscan Media offers Blessed Claudio Granzotto as its saint for today, a Franciscan sculptor who died in 1947 and whose parish priest, when Claudio entered the friars, wrote that the Order was receiving an artist and a saint. His biographer writes that his work “still turns people toward God.” That’s the watchman’s job described without a trumpet. Some people turn a brother with a word; Claudio did it with a chisel. What matters is that he didn’t keep the truth to himself.

You know the person. You’ve known for a while. Go and tell him.

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Notes

1. Daniel A. Keating, Ezekiel, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2024), 228-229. ↩
2. Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Old Testament, Prophetic Books, commentary on Ezekiel 33:1-9 (Dublin: Four Courts Press; New York: Scepter Publishers, 2005), 726. ↩
3. Keating, Ezekiel, 230. ↩
4. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel 10.33.1-9; Augustine, Sermon 46.20; Gregory of Nazianzus, In Defense of His Flight to Pontus, Oration 2.64; all in Kenneth Stevenson and Michael Glerup, eds., Ezekiel, Daniel, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament 13 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 98-99. ↩
5. Possidius, Life of Augustine 19.5-6, in Stevenson and Glerup, Ezekiel, Daniel, 99; also quoted in Keating, Ezekiel, 230. ↩
6. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 230-231. ↩
7. Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 269, 271; Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 231. ↩
8. Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 232; Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 269; Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, trans. Jeremy Holmes (Lander, WY: Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2013), 149 (no. 1524). ↩
9. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, 146-149 (nos. 1516-1523). ↩
10. Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 232-233; Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 269; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1373. ↩

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)
• Kenneth Stevenson and Michael Glerup, eds., Ezekiel, Daniel, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament 13 (InterVarsity Press, 2008)
• 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)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew 13-28, Latin-English Opera Omnia (The Aquinas Institute)
• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)