You Cannot Inherit Holiness

There’s a real comfort in belonging to something holy, and both of today’s readings speak to that.

Some of the Thessalonians had stopped working. They stayed in the church, ate at the common table, and let other people’s labor carry them. The scribes and Pharisees kept the tombs of the prophets in good repair and said out loud that if they had lived in their fathers’ day, they would have listened. Both groups were living off a holiness that belonged to somebody else. Paul answers with his own hands: we worked night and day so we would not burden you, and so you would have a model to copy. Jesus answers with a harder image, a tomb painted white on the outside.

The question underneath both readings is worth spending some time with today. Subtract everything you inherited, the parish you were raised in, the faith of your parents, the saints whose feasts you keep. What obedience is actually yours?

The Readings

First Reading: 2 Thessalonians 3:6-10, 16-18

Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from any brother who is living in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us; we were not idle when we were with you, we did not eat any one’s bread without paying, but with toil and labor we worked night and day, that we might not burden any of you. It was not because we have not that right, but to give you in our conduct an example to imitate. For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: If any one will not work, let him not eat.

Now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times in all ways. The Lord be with you all.

I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. This is the mark in every letter of mine; it is the way I write. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.

Gospel: Matthew 23:27-32

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you witness against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers.”

Scriptural Analysis

Paul has spent most of 2 Thessalonians on the day of the Lord. Here he turns to the second problem in the church, and it’s a very ordinary one. Some of the Thessalonians have quit working. This wasn’t a new development. When Paul founded the church, he and his companions supported themselves with their own labor and taught the Thessalonians to do the same (1 Thessalonians 2:9; 4:9-12). By the time he writes this letter, word has reached him that some have ignored the instruction, and he fires off the sharpest rebuke in an otherwise warm correspondence.¹

Commentators have often tied the idleness to the eschatological confusion in chapter 2. If the day of the Lord has already come, why bother working? Paul himself never joins the two problems, and his warnings about work began during his founding visit, before the confusion about the day of the Lord had set in. A sociological explanation fits the evidence better. The early Christians took sharing possessions seriously, and first-century evidence shows that some accepted aid they didn’t need. The Didache warns about it. Paul is dealing with people who found a generous community and settled into it.¹

The Greek word Paul uses for their behavior is ataktos, “disorderly,” a word that carries the sense of undisciplined or even illicit conduct. It has a public dimension. These people are failing to “work quietly” in the sense of 1 Thessalonians 4:11, to be modest and unassuming, and they are assuming that others will pick up their slack. Paul sharpens it with a play on words. They ought to be workers, ergazomai, and instead they are busybodies, periergazomai, people who work all the way around other people’s business while neglecting their own.¹ The Sacra Pagina commentary reads the disorder as a violation of the community’s set order, a failure to act according to the pattern the apostles handed on.² The idle man has become a burden and a nuisance at the same time.

Then comes the line that has taken on a life of its own outside the letter: if anyone will not work, let him not eat. Read carelessly, this verse becomes a club wielded against those who to us seem lazy. It’s worth noticing exactly who Paul has in mind. The verb describes the unwilling. The men standing around in the marketplace in the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) want work and cannot find it, and they are nowhere in Paul’s sights.³ The Church has said so directly. This is one of the rare passages where the Magisterium has settled the interpretation of a specific verse. In Quadragesimo Anno, Pius XI warns against “the unwarranted and unmerited appeal made by some to the Apostle,” and states that Paul “in no wise teaches that labor is the sole title to a living or an income.”⁴ Paul directs the lazy to work and everyone else to be generous. Both halves are the command.

The Fathers read the verse the same way. Athanasius says Antony went out to the desert and labored with his hands precisely because he had heard this line, and that he spent part of what he earned on bread and part on the needy.⁵ The monk who takes Paul seriously ends up feeding somebody.

Notice what Paul actually offers them. He gives them himself. He had every right to be supported by the church he founded, a right that comes from Jesus’ command (1 Corinthians 9:14; Luke 10:7). He waived it so they would have something to copy.¹ The tradition he keeps invoking has a face on it. They watched him make tents at night.

The lectionary then skips to the closing lines, and they belong to the same argument. Paul prays that the Lord of peace give them peace “at all times in all ways,” and the timing matters. He has just told them to withdraw from members of their own community. Painful discipline is coming, and he asks God for peace on every front at once.⁶ He signs the letter in his own hand, calling it “the mark in every letter of mine.” Jerome understood why: Paul wanted to remove any suspicion that the letter was a forgery, a live concern in a church already unsettled by a letter claiming to be his (2 Thessalonians 2:2).⁶ And then the grace, prayed for “all of you,” repeated from verse 16. The people about to be corrected are included in the blessing.

The Gospel takes the same challenge and drives it home much deeper.

Jesus is in the temple, in the last days of his public life, working through a series of woes. The form is prophetic. Amos and Isaiah pronounce woes on people with power and influence, describe the evil, and announce judgment, and the goal is to warn everyone else away from following them.⁷ Jesus aims them squarely at the men who hold power over the people’s religion.

The sixth woe compares the scribes and Pharisees to whitewashed tombs. The custom behind it is well understood. Tombs and burial monuments were plastered with fresh chalk when the limestone weathered, and under the law of Moses, contact with the dead, including their bones and graves, made a person ritually unclean and unfit for the sanctuary (Numbers 19:16-22). So the whitening was a courtesy. It made the tomb visible so nobody would stumble into defilement. Jesus turns the courtesy into an accusation: these men keep a pious surface and carry uncleanness inside, and they are capable of spreading it to everyone who touches them.⁸

Saint Thomas presses the image further. A sepulcher, he says, is where a dead body rests. The bodies of the saints are the temple of God, because God dwells in them. The body of a sinner is a sepulcher, because it holds something dead: the soul that has died through sin. And inside a sepulcher, there is sometimes an image on the outside so lifelike that it seems alive. He compares it to Revelation 3:1: “you have the name of being alive, and you are dead.”⁹ Stand in front of a Roman relief, and you’ll see what he means. The stone faces have the shape of living men but none of the breath.

The seventh woe is the heaviest, and Thomas raises the obvious objection to it. Is it wrong to honor the dead? Don’t Catholics place the bodies of the saints in cases of silver and gold? Some commentators answer that the Pharisees were condemned for a bad intention: they built the tombs to keep their fathers’ crimes in public memory. Thomas rejects that reading as a poor fit for the text. His own answer is simpler and much more searching: they are blamed because building the tombs was the whole of their religion, an exterior sign of piety and nothing behind it, the same fault as tithing mint and cumin. He quotes Chrysostom to make his point: if a man does many good things, decorates sepulchers, keeps a generous hand, and builds in stone while intending his own glory and refusing to walk in the ways of the Lord, it does him no good at all.⁹

That is a genuinely Catholic reading, and it protects something a flatter reading destroys. The shrine, the reliquary, the feast day, the stone church are all good. They become tombs when the men who build them refuse to walk the same roads the saints walked.

Then Jesus names their self-defense and turns it against them. They say they would not have shed the prophets’ blood. Thomas observes how ordinary this is: we are all harsh judges of other people’s deeds, quick to call another man’s sin great and quick to shrink our own. These men knew their fathers’ malice thoroughly and their own not at all, which is exactly the beam and the speck of Matthew 7:5.⁹ By honoring the prophets while plotting against the Prophet standing in front of them, they testify against themselves.

“Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers,” Thomas notes that the verb is declarative rather than a command. You will fill it up. It carries the same weight as the words to Judas, “what you do, do quickly” (John 13:27). Everything comes to pass under God’s certain judgment, and in that judgment the penalty is not exacted until the guilt reaches its full height. Their fathers killed the servants. These men will kill the Son, and the measure will be complete.⁹ Matthew’s image is a cup filled with iniquity to the brim, held back until it spills over.⁸

Paul had already written that image to the Thessalonians, describing those who killed the prophets and the Lord Jesus, and wrath coming upon them at last (1 Thessalonians 2:15-16). The letter about lazy Christians and the woe against whitewashed tombs are closer together than they initially look.

Daily Application

What should frighten us about the Pharisees is that they had no idea. They slept fine. They were respected, they were busy with religion, and Jesus tells them they are graves. That kind of blindness can affect us all, and it grows best when we have been near holy things for a long time.⁸

So begin with the grace of self-knowledge, and ask for it as a grace, because you will not manufacture it. This is one of the clearest arguments for regular confession that Scripture gives us. We need to walk into that confessional every few weeks, share what is inside us out loud with a priest, and it is in that saying that we break the whitewash. A soul that never has to describe itself will decorate itself instead.

Then do the work. Paul’s answer to a church going soft was to remind them what his hands looked like. There’s something bracing in that. He handed them his own hands and said, in effect, you watched me; do what I did. Whatever is in front of you today, the shift, the kids, the aging parent, the class you teach, the yard, the books you keep for somebody else, that is where your obedience actually lives. And notice why Paul worked. He kept saying it: so as not to burden any of you. He worked for other people’s sake. That is the difference between labor and hustle.

Today’s saint knew both halves of that. Joseph Calasanz was a priest with degrees in canon law and theology, respected, well positioned, and he set the career aside because poor children in Rome had no schooling. When nobody would take up the work, he and a few companions opened a free school themselves and kept opening them as the demand outran the buildings. Then the Church stripped him of his exterior. Prejudice and political maneuvering tore at his institute; papal commissions investigated him again and again; he was demoted, and before he died at 92, the Piarists were suppressed. He submitted to it. He was certain the work would be recognized someday, and he waited with patience and forgiveness for something he never saw. The Church restored his order after he was laid to rest.

That is the whitewashed tomb turned inside out. The outside of his life looked like a ruined project. The inside was alive.

And here is the honest question for the rest of us. If the outside of your faith were stripped the way it was stripped from Calasanz- the reputation, the role in the parish, the family name, the approval- what would be left standing? Whatever answer comes back is the real size of your interior life. If it’s small, that is useful to know today, and there is a confessional and a Wednesday’s worth of work waiting to make it larger.

Nobody is going to inherit this for you, and God is not asking you to be spectacular. Go do the work in front of you, do it for someone else, and let him clean the inside of the cup.

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Notes

1. ↑ Nathan Eubank, First and Second Thessalonians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019), 184-86.
2. ↑ Earl J. Richard, First and Second Thessalonians, Sacra Pagina 11 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 389-90.
3. ↑ Eubank, First and Second Thessalonians, 186.
4. ↑ Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1931), no. 57; quoted and discussed in Eubank, First and Second Thessalonians, 192.
5. ↑ Athanasius, Life of St. Anthony, trans. Mary Emily Keenan, Fathers of the Church 15 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1952), 137; quoted in Eubank, First and Second Thessalonians, 187.
6. ↑ Eubank, First and Second Thessalonians, 192-93.
7. ↑ Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 327.
8. ↑ Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 297-98.
9. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, ed. The Aquinas Institute, trans. Jeremy Holmes (Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2013), 275-77.

Books Cited

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• Nathan Eubank, First and Second Thessalonians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2019)
• Earl J. Richard, First and Second Thessalonians, Sacra Pagina 11 (Liturgical Press)
• Daniel J. Harrington, SJ, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Liturgical Press)
• Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2010)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew 13-28, Latin-English Opera Omnia (The Aquinas Institute, 2013)