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The Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)

The name Ezekiel means “may God strengthen me.” Today’s first reading is from the prophet Ezekiel, who describes two different Israelites. The first is virtuous and turns from virtue to iniquity. Thus, he dies due to his iniquity (i.e. “sin”; iniquity literally means “uneven”).

The second Israelite is wicked, yet he turns away from his wickedness, his iniquity. Thereafter, this man preserves his life: “he shall not die” (Ezekiel 18:28).

In today’s Gospel, St. Matthew describes the chief priests and elders (representatives of the Sanhedrin) who approach Jesus to question him. Jesus presents them with the Parable of the Two Sons. The father of the two sons asks them separately to go out and to work in the vineyard.

The first son replied to the father’s command negatively before changing his mind and doing the father’s will (see Mt 7:21). This son corresponds with the second man Ezekiel described in the first reading: he turns from his wickedness.

The second son pays mere lip service to his father, responding initially in the positive, but in the end, he fails to carry out the will of his father (again, see Mt 7:21). This son images the first man Ezekiel spoke of: he begins virtuous – giving a verbal “yes” – but in the end, he lies in the filthy muck of his own iniquity.

Both Jesus’ questioners and the public sinners of Jesus’ ministry stand within the depths of their own different types of iniquity. In Jesus’ day, it was the prostitutes and tax collectors (remember, St. Matthew was a tax collector) who humbly recognized their sin and allowed Jesus to heal them.

When we compare the first reading and the Gospel with the second reading taken from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, we come full circle. The Apostle exhorts Christians to follow Jesus who humbled himself, “taking the form of a slave” (Phil 2:7). The lesson for us to learn is that humility serves as the ground principle of Christianity.

In prayer, let us bow before our Heavenly Father and ask him to strengthen us to both assent to and walk in his divine will. This takes the humility of one who imitates Jesus who “humbled himself” (Phil 2:8). The art of imitating Christ can only be accomplished by a life of prayer in union with the same Christ.

“Unless humility precede, accompany, and follow every good action which we perform, being at once the object which we keep before our eyes, the support to which we cling, and the monitor by which we are restrained, pride wrests wholly from our hand any good work on which we are congratulating ourselves” (St. Augustine, Letter to Dioscorus [Letter 118], par. 22).