Every one of us has something we could not stand to lose. Not the things we’d miss, the thing whose loss would leave us unrecognizable to ourselves. Ezekiel had a wife. Israel had a temple. A young man on a road outside Jericho had a portfolio. Scripture calls all three by the same name: the delight of your eyes.

And here is what should stop us cold. God takes the first one away without asking. He asks the second one to be handed over freely. The prophet obeys and buries his wife in silence. The young man hears the invitation, does the arithmetic, and walks off grieving. Both men lose something today. Only one of them loses it to God.

So the question the readings put to you is uncomfortable and worth sitting with. What is the delight of your eyes? And if the Lord asked you for it this morning, would you hand it over, or would you go home sad?

The Readings

First Reading: Ezekiel 24:15-23

Also the word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, behold, I am about to take the delight of your eyes away from you at a stroke; yet you shall not mourn or weep nor shall your tears run down. Sigh, but not aloud; make no mourning for the dead. Bind on your turban, and put your shoes on your feet; do not cover your lips, nor eat the bread of mourners.” So I spoke to the people in the morning, and at evening my wife died. And on the next morning I did as I was commanded.

And the people said to me, “Will you not tell us what these things mean for us, that you are acting thus?” Then I said to them, “The word of the Lord came to me: ‘Say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will profane my sanctuary, the pride of your power, the delight of your eyes, and the desire of your soul; and your sons and your daughters whom you left behind shall fall by the sword. And you shall do as I have done; you shall not cover your lips, nor eat the bread of mourners. Your turbans shall be on your heads and your shoes on your feet; you shall not mourn or weep, but you shall pine away in your iniquities and groan to one another.

Gospel: Matthew 19:16-22

And behold, one came up to him, saying, “Teacher, what good deed must I do, to have eternal life?” And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? One there is who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.” He said to him, “Which?” And Jesus said, “You shall not kill, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother, and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The young man said to him, “All these I have observed; what do I still lack?” Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” When the young man heard this, he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions.

Scriptural Analysis

Ezekiel Buries His Wife

Chapter 24 closes the first half of Ezekiel’s book, and it closes it hard. The chapter opens with a date, January 5, 588 BC, the day Nebuchadnezzar’s army sat down around Jerusalem and began the siege that would end the city.^[1] Ezekiel is in Babylon, five hundred miles from the walls, and the Lord tells him to write the date down. When the exiles later learn that the siege began on exactly that day, they will know a prophet has been living among them.

What follows is the most costly of all his prophetic sign-acts. Ezekiel had already shaved his head with a sword and dug through a wall in the dark with an exile’s bag on his back. This time the sign is his wife.

“I am about to take the delight of your eyes away from you at a stroke” (Ezekiel 24:16). The Hebrew phrase is tender, and it turns up in Lamentations for what is most precious and most exposed (Lamentations 2:4). She was young. Her death was sudden. Ezekiel gets one morning of warning, and then the Lord adds the second command, which is the real weight of the passage: do not mourn her.

Understand what that means in that culture. Mourning was not private in ancient Israel; it was the community’s public liturgy of grief. You cried aloud. You pulled off your turban and your sandals. You covered your beard and your upper lip. Neighbors brought the bread of mourners to your table and sat with you. Even the poorest household did these things.^[2] Ezekiel is ordered to do none of it. He preaches in the morning as if nothing were coming, his wife dies at evening, and the next morning he stands there with his turban tied and his sandals on and grief locked behind his teeth.

The people notice immediately, which is the point. “Will you not tell us what these things mean for us?” (Ezekiel 24:19). His answer lands like a hammer. The Lord is about to profane his own sanctuary, and he names the temple with the exact words used for the dead woman: the pride of your power, the delight of your eyes, the desire of your soul (Ezekiel 24:21).

That phrase “the pride of your power” is lifted straight out of the covenant curses of Leviticus. “If in spite of this you will not listen to me, then I will chastise you again sevenfold for your sins, and I will break the pride of your power” (Leviticus 26:18-19). Ezekiel is telling the exiles that what Moses warned about is now happening in real time. The temple was never a lucky charm. It was the sign of a covenant with obligations attached, and Israel had spent generations treating the building as insurance against the God who lived in it.

Jerusalem mattered to these people the way a spouse matters. Moses had prophesied that the Lord would put his name there to dwell among his people (Deuteronomy 12:5), and even in Babylon the exiles sang, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither” (Psalm 137:5). Losing it seemed literally unthinkable. Ezekiel tells them it is already scheduled.

And they will not be allowed to grieve it properly either. Moshe Greenberg puts it exactly right: there will be “only private, isolated groaning and moaning.”^[3] Jeremiah heard the same words in Jerusalem: “Do not enter the house of mourning, or go to lament, or bemoan them; for I have taken away my peace from this people” (Jeremiah 16:5). Public mourning is an act of solidarity, and solidarity assumes the loss was undeserved. This loss is not. The exiles will pine away in their iniquities, which is a very different thing from weeping over a tragedy.

The earlier half of the chapter gives the reason. Jerusalem is the pot on the fire, and the Lord says he will heat it until the copper glows and the rust burns out of it. “I would have cleansed you, and you were not cleansed from your filthiness” (Ezekiel 24:13). The fire is not spite. It is purification of a vessel that would not come clean any other way. St. John of the Cross read this chapter as a map of the soul, and said that to rid the soul of the desires that stain it, the soul must in a sense be overthrown and unmade.^[4] Every one of us who has been through a stripping we did not choose knows that this is true and hates that it is true.

One more thing. Six centuries later another prophet stood on the Mount of Olives, looked across the Kidron at that rebuilt temple, and wept over the same city for the same reason. “You did not know the time of your visitation” (Luke 19:44). Ezekiel’s silent grief and the tears of Christ are the two ends of one rope.

The Young Man Who Had Kept Everything

Matthew’s young man asks the best question in the Gospel. “Teacher, what good deed must I do, to have eternal life?” (Matthew 19:16). John Paul II said this question rises from the depths of a man’s heart and is unavoidable for every human life, because it is about moral good and about eternal life at the same time.^[5] The young man senses that these two are connected. He is right.

Jesus answers with a riddle. “Why do you ask me about what is good? One there is who is good.” The Arians once tried to use this line to prove the Son is less than the Father. It proves the opposite when you follow the episode to the end. Jesus tells the man what the good is (Matthew 19:18-19) and then tells him to come and follow him (Matthew 19:21). He is offering himself as the answer. He is divine goodness standing in the road in sandals.^[6]

Then the basic condition: “If you would enter life, keep the commandments.” The Torah has always promised life to the one who keeps the law (Leviticus 18:5, Deuteronomy 30:15-20). When the young man asks “Which?” he is not shopping for the easy ones. With more than six hundred commands on the books, he wants to know where the weight falls.^[7] Jesus gives him the second tablet of the Decalogue and then adds Leviticus 19:18, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” which gathers all of them into one.

“All these I have observed; what do I still lack?” Read that slowly, because it is the most honest sentence in the passage. A man boasting would have stopped after the first clause. This man keeps going. He is not content, and he knows it, and he cannot name why.^[8] The Church has always seen something admirable in him. He came to Jesus wanting to be made better, and Chrysostom noted that Jesus never accused him of testing, the way he did with the Pharisees.^[9] Mark tells us Jesus looked at him and loved him (Mark 10:21).

And then the invitation. “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor… and come, follow me.”

Here St. Thomas is worth listening to carefully, because this verse gets misused in both directions. Perfection is not located in the selling. Perfection is charity, and Aquinas quotes Colossians 3:14, “above all these things have charity, which is the bond of perfection.” Selling what you own is the road, the clearing away, the unburdening that makes the following possible.^[10] Aquinas says a man is perfect in charity when he loves God even to the contempt of self and of his own things, and adds the sober observation that it is nearly impossible to hold riches without being quietly pulled by them.

Aquinas also passes on a line from Augustine that lands with real force. Giving up the desire to have things is meritorious. Giving up what you have already acquired is harder and worth more, because it is more difficult to tear away what has already grown into you than what never did.^[11] That is the young man exactly. His possessions had grown into him. He could not tell where they stopped and he began.

So he went away sorrowful. Notice that he obeyed his sadness. He had asked what he still lacked; he received a precise answer, and he chose his portfolio over the answer. Jerome concluded he had been dishonest about loving his neighbor all along; Chrysostom held that he had genuinely kept the law and was simply held by one passion he would not surrender.^[12] Chrysostom’s reading is the more merciful and probably the more accurate, and it is far more frightening, because it means a man can keep every commandment on the list and still be owned by something.

Both readings put the same knife in the same place. Ezekiel’s temple and the young man’s wealth were good things. Neither one was a sin. The problem in both cases is that a good thing had become the desire of the soul, the load-bearing wall, and God will not leave a load-bearing wall standing where he intends to live.

Daily Application

Sometimes the Lord takes the delight of your eyes and does not ask first. If you have lived long enough, you have watched it happen. A diagnosis. A layoff at fifty-eight. A child who stops calling. A spouse buried on a Tuesday. And the temptation in that moment is to conclude that God is indifferent or absent, or that you are being punished for something. Ezekiel’s chapter refuses both conclusions. The fire under the pot is set for cleansing, and the Lord says plainly he would have done it another way if the people had let him (Ezekiel 24:13). He is not careless with what he takes. He is after the rust.

That does not mean you are forbidden to grieve. Ezekiel’s silence was a prophetic sign for one specific week in 588 BC, not a rule for the rest of us. Christ wept at Lazarus’s tomb and over Jerusalem, and the Church buries her dead with tears and incense and the Mass. What Ezekiel’s obedience teaches is something narrower and more useful. Even inside a loss you did not choose, you can still hand God something. Ezekiel gave him his silence. You may only be able to give him one morning of getting dressed and going to work when everything in you wants to stay in bed. That counts. That is a sign-act too, and somebody in your life is watching it the way the exiles watched him.

Then the easier one, which is not easy at all. Most of us are not being asked to bury anyone this week. Most of us are the young man.

He is likable, and that is the danger. He goes to Mass. He does not cheat, does not sleep around, does not lie in court, calls his mother. If you asked him, he could tell you every commandment he has kept, and he would be telling the truth. And there is still one thing he will not put on the table, and he knows what it is, and so do you about yours. It may be money. More often it is the retirement number, the reputation, the grudge you have polished for eleven years, the career you have organized your family’s life around, the quiet certainty that you will decide how your children turn out. Whatever it is, you can locate it fast by asking a single question: what could God ask me for tonight that I would say no to?

Sit with your answer instead of arguing with it. Then bring it to the Lord and say it out loud, which is what the young man never did. He did not negotiate, ask for help, or say, “I want to and I can’t.” He just left. Had he stayed and admitted he was stuck, the same Christ who told the disciples five verses later that what is impossible for men is possible for God (Matthew 19:26) would have had something to say to him.

Saint Joan of the Cross, whose memory the Church keeps today, is the young man’s story with a different ending. She ran a shop near a shrine in Anjou and had a reputation for greed and for brushing off the beggars at her door. One of them, an old woman most people wrote off as insane, got past her guard. Joan closed the family business, gave herself to the poor, took the name Joan of the Cross, and died in 1736, having founded twelve houses, hospices, and schools. She was rich, and she had been asked. The difference between her and the man in Matthew 19 is not temperament or talent. She said yes when she was asked. That is the whole difference, and it is available to you.

So make the ask concrete before this day is over. Share with God the one thing you are willing to be asked to give up, even if you are not yet sure that you could give it up. Then go find the person at your door you have been brushing past, and start there.

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Notes

1. The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, note on Ezekiel 24:1-27 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004). ↩
2. Navarre Bible, note on Ezekiel 24:15-27. ↩
3. Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 21-37, Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 509. ↩
4. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, 2, 6, 5, quoted in The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, note on Ezekiel 24:3-14. ↩
5. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1993), no. 8. ↩
6. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 246. ↩
7. Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 247. ↩
8. Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 247. ↩
9. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, chap. 19, lect. 1, no. 1580, citing John Chrysostom. ↩
10. Aquinas, Commentary on Saint Matthew, chap. 19, lect. 1, nos. 1592-1593. ↩
11. Augustine, quoted in Aquinas, Commentary on Saint Matthew, chap. 19, lect. 1, no. 1599. ↩
12. Aquinas, Commentary on Saint Matthew, chap. 19, lect. 1, no. 1587; see also Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 281. ↩

Books Cited

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• 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)
• University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, Four Courts Press, 2005
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew 13-28, Latin-English Opera Omnia (Emmaus Academic)