He Changed His Mind and Went

Most of us are fluent in yes. We said it at the font through our godparents, again at Confirmation, maybe again at the altar with a ring in hand, and we say it every Sunday when the minister holds up the Host and we answer, “Amen.” Yes is easy; it costs nothing at the moment you say it. Today’s readings put a harder question to people like us, and I count myself among them. Ezekiel’s hearers grumble that God isn’t fair, because he won’t let a lifetime of good behavior bank credit against a late collapse, and he won’t hold a lifetime of sin against a man who turns around. In the Gospel, Jesus tells the chief priests about two sons. One says “I will not” and then goes. The other says “I go, sir” and never shows up.

Underneath both readings sits something we rarely admit. We’d like God to keep a ledger, because we suspect the ledger favors us. We said yes early and often, and we’d like that to count. The tax collectors and prostitutes who waded into the Jordan offend us for the same reason they offended the elders of Jerusalem: they skipped the part where you build up a record. What the Father looks for is simpler and more frightening. Did you go into the vineyard?

Today is the Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, and the Lord’s Day takes the place of the memorial of Saint Vincent de Paul, whom Franciscan Media sets before us today. He’s the right companion for this Gospel. He became a priest with his eye on a comfortable living, and by his own account his temper would have made him a hard man to be around. Then he changed his mind and went. So which son answered for you at Mass this morning?

The Readings

First Reading: Ezekiel 18:25-28

“Yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way not just? Is it not your ways that are not just? When a righteous man turns away from his righteousness and commits iniquity, he shall die for it; for the iniquity which he has committed he shall die. Again, when a wicked man turns away from the wickedness he has committed and does what is lawful and right, he shall save his life. Because he considered and turned away from all the transgressions which he had committed, he shall surely live, he shall not die.

Gospel: Matthew 21:28-32

“What do you think? A man had two sons; and he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ And he answered, ‘I will not’; but afterward he repented and went. And he went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir,’ but did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the harlots believed him; and even when you saw it, you did not afterward repent and believe him.”

Scriptural Analysis

Ezekiel 18 opens with a proverb the exiles in Babylon liked to repeat: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Ezekiel 18:2). If Jerusalem fell for what the fathers did (and the exiles could name names, starting with a king like Manasseh), nobody by the rivers of Babylon had to look in a mirror. Daniel Keating calls it a way to shift the blame onto evil forefathers, and the Lord cuts the ground out from under it. The Navarre commentators say Ezekiel “breaks new ground” here by insisting on individual responsibility: the exiles are suffering for their own sins, and the Lord is being neither cruel nor unjust in allowing it.¹

Today’s four verses are God’s answer to the counterattack. “The way of the Lord is not just.” The Hebrew is lo yittākēn (loh yit-tah-KAYN), and Keating notes that the verb literally means “is weighed” or “is measured.” The people are accusing God of a crooked scale. Keating guesses at the grievance: perhaps they resent that God doesn’t weigh good deeds against bad ones over the whole course of a life. God throws the charge back: “Is it not your ways that are not just?” A righteous man who turns to iniquity dies in it. A wicked man who turns to what is lawful and right “shall save his life,” which in Hebrew reads, literally, “shall cause his soul to live.” Keating puts the whole chapter in one sentence I’d like every Catholic to memorize: God “does not keep a scorecard and give an average of our performance over the course of our lives.”²

The hinge word is “turn,” shub (shoov), which Ezekiel uses more than 50 times. And look at the small detail in verse 28: “Because he considered and turned away.” The turn starts in the mind. A man stops, looks at what he has done, and walks the other way. The Fathers felt both edges of this. Saint John Chrysostom marveled at it: “O such strictness toward the righteous! O such abundant forgiveness toward the sinner!” Saint Jerome put the principle as a rule of judgment: a past offense doesn’t harm the sinner who is now just, and past righteousness doesn’t help the just man who has fallen, because “as each is found, so will it be judged in him.”³

That sounds severe until you see where the chapter lands. A few verses on, the Lord says it outright: “I have no pleasure in the death of any one, says the Lord God; so turn, and live” (Ezekiel 18:32; cf. 18:23). The Navarre editors call it “one of the most beautiful summaries of divine mercy,” and Saint Basil the Great read it the same way: “The Lord does not want the death of the sinner, but that he return and live.”⁴ Verse 31 carries a catch. God tells Israel, “Get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit!” Keating points out that they can’t, and later in the book God promises to do it himself: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you” (Ezekiel 36:26). The Catechism builds its teaching on conversion on that same promise: “The human heart is heavy and hardened. God must give man a new heart.”⁵

Now the Gospel. Matthew sets it in the Temple, the day after Jesus drove out the money changers. The chief priests and elders try to trap him: “By what authority are you doing these things?” (Matthew 21:23). Jesus asks them whether John’s baptism came from heaven or from men, and either answer sinks them. Daniel Harrington observes that the trappers fell into their own trap; all they can say is, “We do not know.” Then Jesus tells the first of three parables aimed at them and asks them to judge it.⁶

A man had two sons. The first answers his father flatly, “I will not.” Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri remind us how that sounded in a culture shaped by Sirach 3, where sons owe their fathers honor: the refusal is “a shameful act of defiance.” Saint Jerome, in the Catena Aurea, says the son “answers haughtily.” But “afterward he repented and went.” Matthew’s verb is metamelētheis (meh-tah-meh-lay-THAYS), a change of mind that turns into regret and then into motion. The second son answers with perfect manners: egō, kyrie (eh-GOH, KOO-ree-eh), literally “I, lord!” Mitch and Sri catch the echo. He calls his father “lord” and doesn’t do his will, which is exactly what Jesus warned about in the Sermon on the Mount: “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father” (Matthew 7:21).⁷

“Which of the two did the will of his father?” The elders answer, “The first,” and they have just sentenced themselves. Saint Thomas Aquinas lays the verdict out with his usual economy: “The first did not promise, but did it; the second promised, but did not do it.” Then he adds a line from Ecclesiastes: it is better not to vow than to vow and not pay (Ecclesiastes 5:5). The second son commits two sins, Thomas says: disobedience and the breaking of his word.⁸ Thomas also reads the father’s command closely. “The vineyard of God is justice,” so working in it means doing the works of justice. And the word “today” means the whole time of your life.⁹

Then the parable springs shut: “The tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.” Harrington explains why those two groups: they were regarded as immoral, tax collectors for cheating and prostitutes for sexual sin, and both were prime examples of Jews who worked hand in glove with the Roman occupation. Mitch and Sri add that they sat at the bottom of the socioreligious scale, outside the covenant as the elders saw it, so that hearing them named first “would have been completely astounding” to the elders, and offensive.¹⁰ The Catechism, describing John at the Jordan, cites this very verse when it says that “a crowd of sinners” came to be baptized by him, among them “tax collectors and soldiers, Pharisees and Sadducees, and prostitutes.” John “came to you in the way of righteousness.” Rabanus Maurus, in the Catena, says that John pointed to Christ, “who is the fulfilling of the Law.” The sinners believed him. The leaders watched them walk into the river, and “even when you saw it, you did not afterward repent,” the same verb as verse 29. The first son changed his mind; the leaders wouldn’t change theirs with the evidence dripping wet in front of them. Thomas gives the hard sentence: “the worst of men is he who does not repent of his deed.”¹¹

Who are the two sons? Saint Jerome reports that some read them as the Gentiles and Israel, and others “simply” as sinners and the righteous. Origen heard Jesus speaking to “such as promise little or nothing, but in their works shine forth,” and against “those who promise great things but do none of these things that they have promised.” Harrington adds a needed caution: Matthew aims the parable at the leaders who refused John, and he keeps the people as a whole out of its line of fire.¹² The Catechism draws the lesson for everyone who has ever answered a parable with a nod. It cites these verses for one short sentence: “Words are not enough, deeds are required.”¹³

Put the readings side by side, and they’re one teaching told twice. Ezekiel’s righteous man who turns to iniquity is the second son, all words and no follow-through. Ezekiel’s wicked man who considers and turns is the first son. In both, God judges the road a person is walking now, and the door marked “turn” stays open until the end. The Catechism calls that turn “a radical reorientation of our whole life, a return, a conversion to God with all our heart.”¹⁴

Daily Application

The interior movement these readings ask for is to stop trusting your yes. A good Catholic life is full of yeses, most of them sincere, and a yes can become a place to hide. We said the right thing, so we feel like we did the right thing. The second son probably meant it when he said “I go, sir.” He just never went.

So find one. Name a yes you gave God or someone else and never kept. The friend you promised to pray for and forgot by Tuesday. The confession you’ve been meaning to get to since Lent. The “Amen” you’ll say at Communion today, which is a promise to become what you receive. Pick the one that stings and go do it before tonight. Saint Thomas says “today” means the whole time of your life, which is another way of saying that the only day you can actually work in the vineyard is this one.

Some of you are the other son. You’ve said “I will not” to God, maybe loudly and for years, and you’ve assumed that record settles it. Ezekiel was written for you. None of the transgressions a man has committed “shall be remembered against him” when he turns (Ezekiel 18:22). God keeps no scorecard of the kind you’re afraid of.¹⁵ Start where verse 28 starts: consider. Sit with what you’ve done long enough to be sorry, then walk into a confessional and let the Father’s command find you again. He’s still asking, and he’s still standing at the edge of the vineyard.

And some of us are the elders. We watched someone change their mind (the coworker who came back to the Church, the relative who got sober and got religion), and our first instinct was suspicion. They cut in line. That’s the exact sin Jesus names in verse 32: they saw it and did not believe. If God is glad to see a sinner turn, the only fitting response from the rest of the family is to be glad with him.

Saint Vincent de Paul knew both sons from the inside. Franciscan Media describes him as a man from a small farm in Gascony who “had become a priest with little more ambition than to have a comfortable life.” Then the deathbed confession of a dying servant opened his eyes to the spiritual hunger of the French peasantry, and he went. He founded the Congregation of the Mission to preach in the villages, worked with Saint Louise de Marillac to found the Daughters of Charity, collected relief for the victims of war, and ransomed over 1,200 galley slaves from North Africa. And he did it with a temperament his own friends called irascible. He said that without the grace of God he would have been “hard and repulsive, rough and cross.” Grace made him tender and affectionate, quick to see what other people needed.¹⁶ That’s Ezekiel 36:26 with a name and a date: the new heart a man can’t give himself, given.

Change your mind today, and go. The Father’s word still stands at the gate of the vineyard, and today still counts.

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Notes

1. ↑ Daniel A. Keating, Ezekiel, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2024), 139; The Navarre Bible, Old Testament, commentary on Ezekiel, by members of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Navarre (Dublin: Four Courts Press; New York: Scepter Publishers, 2005), 663.
2. ↑ Keating, Ezekiel, 140, 143.
3. ↑ Saint John Chrysostom, Homilies on Repentance and Almsgiving 7.2.5, and Saint Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel 6.18.24, in Kenneth Stevenson and Michael Glerup, eds., Ezekiel, Daniel, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Old Testament XIII (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press), 82.
4. ↑ Navarre Bible, commentary on Ezekiel, 666; Saint Basil the Great, Letter 44, quoted in Keating, Ezekiel, 141.
5. ↑ Keating, Ezekiel, 141; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1432.
6. ↑ Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 299-300.
7. ↑ Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 275; Saint Jerome, quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 1, St. Matthew (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1841), on Matt 21:28-32.
8. ↑ 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), C. 21, L. 2, no. 1729.
9. ↑ Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, C. 21, L. 2, no. 1727.
10. ↑ Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 299; Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 275-276.
11. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 535; Rabanus Maurus, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, St. Matthew, on Matt 21:28-32; Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, C. 21, L. 2, no. 1732.
12. ↑ Saint Jerome and Origen, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, St. Matthew, on Matt 21:28-32; Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 301.
13. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 546.
14. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1431.
15. ↑ Keating, Ezekiel, 143.
16. ↑ “Saint Vincent de Paul,” Saint of the Day, Franciscan Media, accessed September 26, 2026, franciscanmedia.org.

Books Cited

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• Daniel A. Keating, Ezekiel, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2024)
• Faculty of Theology of the University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets (Four Courts Press; Scepter Publishers, 2005)
• Kenneth Stevenson and Michael Glerup, eds., Ezekiel, Daniel, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Old Testament XIII (InterVarsity Press, 2008)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
• Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Liturgical Press, 1991)
• Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2010)
• Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, four-volume edition (Baronius Press)
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, trans. Jeremy Holmes (Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2013)