August 12, 2026
Wednesday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Lectionary: 415
Reading 1
The LORD cried loud for me to hear:
Come, you scourges of the city!
With that I saw six men coming from the direction
of the upper gate which faces the north,
each with a destroying weapon in his hand.
In their midst was a man dressed in linen,
with a writer’s case at his waist.
They entered and stood beside the bronze altar.
Then he called to the man dressed in linen
with the writer’s case at his waist, saying to him:
Pass through the city, through Jerusalem,
and mark a “Thau” on the foreheads of those who moan and groan
over all the abominations that are practiced within it.
To the others I heard the LORD say:
Pass through the city after him and strike!
Do not look on them with pity nor show any mercy!
Old men, youths and maidens, women and children–wipe them out!
But do not touch any marked with the “Thau”; begin at my sanctuary.
So they began with the men, the elders, who were in front of the temple.
Defile the temple, he said to them, and fill the courts with the slain;
then go out and strike in the city.
Then the glory of the LORD left the threshold of the temple
and rested upon the cherubim.
These lifted their wings, and I saw them rise from the earth,
the wheels rising along with them.
They stood at the entrance of the eastern gate of the Lord’s house,
and the glory of the God of Israel was up above them.
Then the cherubim lifted their wings, and the wheels went along with them,
while up above them was the glory of the God of Israel.
Responsorial Psalm
R. (4b) The glory of the Lord is higher than the
skies.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Praise, you servants of the LORD,
praise the name of the LORD.
Blessed be the name of the LORD
both now and forever.
R. The glory of the Lord is higher than the skies.
or:
R. Alleluia.
From the rising to the setting of the sun
is the name of the LORD to be praised.
High above all nations is the LORD;
above the heavens is his glory.
R. The glory of the Lord is higher than the skies.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Who is like the LORD, our God, who is enthroned on high,
and looks upon the heavens and the earth below?
R. The glory of the Lord is higher than the skies.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Alleluia
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ,
and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Jesus said to his disciples:
"If your brother sins against you,
go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.
If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.
If he does not listen,
take one or two others along with you,
so that every fact may be established
on the testimony of two or three witnesses.
If he refuses to listen to them, tell the Church.
If he refuses to listen even to the Church,
then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.
Amen, 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, amen, I say to you, if two of you agree on earth
about anything for which they are to pray,
it shall be granted to them by my heavenly Father.
For where two or three are gathered together in my name,
there am I in the midst of them."
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/wednesday-nineteenth-week-ordinary-time
Commentary on
Ezekiel 9:1-7; 10:18-22
Today’s reading is in two parts:
- Slaughter
of idolaters (chap 9);
- God’s
glory leaves the Temple (chap 10).
It is another apocalyptic-style account using very symbolic
language in which God’s punishment comes on all those who have sinned.
As Ezekiel listens, there comes the thundering voice of God.
He is calling on the “executioners of the city”, that is, those who are to
inflict punishment on wrongdoers.
Immediately six men are seen coming from the gate on the
north side of Jerusalem, each one armed with a deadly weapon, a war-club or a
battle-axe. In their midst is another man, dressed in white and with a scribe’s
ink horn in his belt. Clearly the latter is the one who keeps a record of
people’s doings. These are the six guardian angels of the city, with the
seventh dressed in linen. They correspond to the seven angels of the judgement
in the Book of Revelation (8:2,6).
They stop in front of the bronze altar in the Temple. Now
the glory of the Lord, traditionally understood as seated on the cherubim (in
the Holy of Holies), moves towards the Temple threshold. God is leaving the
Temple.
He gives instructions to the man in white. He is to put a
mark on the foreheads of all those who deplore the idolatrous practices that
are going on. These are the faithful remnant of God’s people. The mark was
a taw, the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which looks like an
“x” (and so translated as “cross”). The rest were to be mercilessly struck
down. (The text does not indicate that anyone was, in fact, found worthy to be
marked with a taw, but it would indicate the remnant that was spared
to return from exile.)
Ezekiel is the preeminent prophet of personal and individual
retribution. The innocent inhabitants of Jerusalem are to be spared, while
those guilty of idolatry are punished. With other prophets, the whole
community, the innocent along with the guilty, may be punished.
The punishment begins right at the entrance to the Temple
where God’s people are, and begins with the eldest and excludes none—old men,
youths and maidens, women and children. The Temple is to become defiled with
the corpses of people who are unclean. It does not matter because Yahweh is no
longer there.
In the second part of the reading, Yahweh leaves his
sanctuary. Riding as usual on the cherubim, he leaves the Temple by the east
gate. The east gate was the main ceremonial entrance into the Temple and was
also known as “gate of the house of the Lord”. It overlooked the Kidron Valley
towards the Mount of Olives.
Now Yahweh has left Jerusalem and the Temple. The prophet
says that:
The cherubim lifted up their wings and rose up from the
earth in my sight as they went out with the wheels beside them. They stopped at
the entrance of the east gate of the house of the Lord, and the glory of the
God of Israel was above them.
For us Christians, God is never confined to one place. He is
everywhere and we are urged to seek and find him in all things. We do not seek
him in a temple. On the contrary, we are called to be his
temple, the place where he is present. We can, however, expel him from our
hearts and bring ruin on ourselves just as the people of Jerusalem did. The
choice is ours.
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Commentary on
Matthew 18:15-20
Today’s part of the ‘Discourse on the Church’ shifts from
the harm that we can do to others, to the harm that others can do to the
community, and how the community and its members should respond. Clearly we are
speaking here of some serious wrong which hurts the mission of the Church
community.
The wrongdoer is to be tackled on three levels, and this
reflects what has just gone before about bringing back the sheep which is lost.
Reconciliation, not punishment, is the objective.
If the wrong directly affects one person, then that person
or another should go along to the wrongdoer privately and try to help the
individual change their ways. If this works, then that is the end of the
matter. However, if the wrongdoer will not listen, then one or two others who
are also aware of the wrongdoing should be brought along as corroboration. This
is based on a passage from Deuteronomy:
A single witness shall not suffice to convict a person of
any crime or wrongdoing in connection with any offense that may be committed.
Only on the evidence of two or three witnesses shall a charge be sustained. (Deut
19:15)
If the wrongdoer remains obstinate in the face of this
evidence, then the whole community is to be brought in. And if in the face of
the whole community, there is still no sign of repentance, then the person is
to be expelled and treated like a “gentile and a tax collector”, in other
words, as a total outsider. The tax collectors were among the most despised
people in the community. They were local people employed by Roman tax
contractors to collect taxes for them. Because they worked for Rome and often
demanded unreasonable payments (they had to make a profit!), they gained a bad
reputation and were generally hated and considered traitors to their own people
and their religion.
The word Matthew uses for ‘community’ here is
‘church’, ekklesia or, in Hebrew, qahal, which
refers to the gathering of a Christian community. As mentioned earlier, this is
only one of two places where this term is used in the Gospels (the other is Matt
16:18).
Jesus now goes further in saying that all such decisions by
the community have God’s full endorsement:
…whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. [i.e.
by God]
Jesus also tells them:
…if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it
will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are
gathered in my name, I am there among them.
This mandate seems to be given to the community as a whole
and not just to specific individuals.
It would be worth our while going carefully through this
text and seeing how it applies to our church situation today. To what extent do
we feel responsible for the wrongdoings of our fellow-Christians? To what
extent do we realise that our behaviour, both as individuals and groups,
reflects on the overall witness that the Church is called to give as the Body
of Christ? Do people clearly see the message of the Gospel from the way we live
both individually and corporately?
While, on the one hand, we are told to be compassionate and
non-judgmental, are we over-tolerant of people in the community who believe
that anything they do is just their own business? Every Christian community has
a solemn responsibility to give witness to the vision of life that Jesus gave
to us. There have then to be standards of behaviour which bind all. Moments of
weakness can be and should be treated with compassion, but deliberate and
continued flouting of our central commitment to truth, love, justice and other
foundational principles cannot be overlooked or allowed to undermine the
central mission of the Christian community to be a sacrament of the Kingdom. It
is not a question of image, but of our integrity.
What has all this to do with the way we use the sacrament of
reconciliation, and what is the relationship of the sacrament to this passage?
The passage is closely linked with what Jesus says about the problem of giving
scandal, of being a stumbling block in people’s coming to Christ. At the same
time, as tomorrow’s passage will indicate, the long-term aim—above all—is not
punishment, but reconciliation and healing of divisions.
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Wednesday,
August 12, 2026
Ordinary Time
Opening Prayer
Almighty and ever-living God,
your Spirit made us your children, confident to call you Father.
Increase your Spirit within us and bring us to our
promised inheritance. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who
lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Gospel Reading - Matthew 18: 15-20
Jesus said to
his disciples. 'If your brother does something wrong, go and have it out with
him alone, between your two selves. If he listens to you, you have won back
your brother. If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you:
whatever the misdemeanor, the evidence of two or three witnesses is required to
sustain the charge. But if he refuses to listen to these, report it to the
community; and if he refuses to listen to the community, treat him like a
gentile or a tax collector. 'In truth I tell you, whatever you bind on earth
will be bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
'In truth I tell you once again, if two of you on earth agree to ask anything
at all, it will be granted to you by my Father in heaven. For where two or
three meet in my name, I am there among them.'
Reflection
In the Gospel of today and of
tomorrow we read and meditate on the second half of the Discourse of the
Community. Today’s Gospel speaks about fraternal correction (Mt 18: 15-18) and
of prayer in common (Mt 18: 19-20). The Gospel of tomorrow speaks about pardon
(Mt 18: 21-22) and presents the parable of pardon without limitations (Mt 18:
23-35). The key word in this second part is “to forgive”. The accent is on
reconciliation. In order that there may be reconciliation which will allow the
little ones to return, it is important to know how to dialogue and to forgive,
because the foundation of fraternity is the gratuitous love of God. It is only
in this way that the community will be a sign of the Kingdom. It is not easy to
forgive. There is a certain grief which continues to strike the heart as with a
hammer. There are persons who say: “I forgive, but I do not forget!” There is:
resentment, tensions, clashes, diverse opinions, and offences, provocations
which render pardon and reconciliation difficult.
The
organization of the words of Jesus in the five Great Discourses of the Gospel
of Matthew indicates that at the end of the first century, the communities had
very concrete forms of catechesis. The Discourse of the Community (Mt 18:
1-35), for example gives updated instructions of how to proceed in case of any
conflict among the members of the community and how to find criteria to solve
the conflicts. Matthew gathers together those phrases of Jesus which can help
the communities of the end of the first century to overcome the two more acute
problems which they had to face at that moment, that is, the exodus of the
little ones because of the scandal given by some and the need to dialogue in
order to overcome the rigor of others in accepting the little ones, the poor,
in the community.
•
Matthew 18: 15-18: Fraternal correction and the
power to forgive. These verses give simple norms of how to proceed in case of
conflicts in the community. If a brother or a sister should sin, if they had
behavior not in accordance to the life of the community, they should not be
denounced immediately. First, it is necessary to try to speak with them alone.
Then it is necessary to try to know the reasons of the other. If no results are
obtained, then it is necessary to take two or three persons of the community to
see if it is possible to obtain some result. Only in extreme cases, it is
necessary to expose the problem to the whole community. And if the person
refuses to listen to the community, then they should be considered by you as “a
sinner or a pagan”, that is, as someone who is not part of the community. Therefore,
it is not you who excludes, but it is the person himself/herself who excludes
himself/herself. The community gathered together only verifies or ratifies the
exclusion. The grace to be able
to forgive and to reconcile in the
name of God was given to Peter (Mt 16: 19), to the Apostles (Jn 20: 23) and,
here in the Discourse of the Community, to the community itself (Mt 18: 18).
This reveals the importance of the decisions which the community assumes in
regard to its members.
•
Matthew 18: 19: Prayer in common. The exclusion
does not mean that the person is abandoned to his/her own fate. No! The person
may be separated from the community but will never be separated from God. In
the case in which the conversation in the community does not produce any result,
and the person does not want to be integrated in the life of the community,
there still remains the last possibility to remain together with the Father to
obtain reconciliation, and Jesus guarantees that the Father will listen: “If
two of you agree to ask anything at all, it will be granted to you by my Father
in Heaven; for where two or three meet in my name, I am there among them”.
•
Matthew 18: 20: The presence of Jesus in the
community. The reason of the certainty of being heard by the Father is the
promise of Jesus: “Because where there are two or three who meet in my name, I
am there among them!” Jesus is the center, the axis, of the community, and, as
such, together with the Community, it will always be praying with us to the
Father, in order that he may grant the gift of the return of the brother or the
sister who have excluded themselves.
Personal Questions
•
Why is it so difficult to forgive? In our
community, is there some space for reconciliation? In which way?
•
Jesus says: "For wherever there are two or
three who meet in my name, I am also there among them.” What does this mean for
us today?
Concluding Prayer
Praise, servants of Yahweh, praise the name of Yahweh. Blessed
be the name of Yahweh, henceforth and forever. (Ps 113: 1-2)
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