Wednesday, August 26, 2026
Wednesday of the Twenty-first week in Ordinary Time
Matthew 23:27-32
Listen to the whole reading — MP3
First reading
2 Thessalonians 3:6-10,16-18
Now we command you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you withdraw yourselves from every brother who walks in rebellion, and not after the tradition which they received from us. For you know how you ought to imitate us. For we didn’t behave ourselves rebelliously among you, neither did we eat bread from anyone’s hand without paying for it, but in labor and travail worked night and day, that we might not burden any of you; not because we don’t have the right, but to make ourselves an example to you, that you should imitate us. For even when we were with you, we commanded you this: “If anyone will not work, don’t let him eat.” Now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times in all ways. The Lord be with you all. The greeting of me, Paul, with my own hand, which is the sign in every letter: this is how I write. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.
Responsorial psalm
Psalms 128:1-2,4-5
Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways. For you will eat the labor of your hands. You will be happy, and it will be well with you. Behold, thus is the man blessed who fears the Lord. May the Lord bless you out of Zion, and may you see the good of Jerusalem all the days of your life.
Gospel
Matthew 23:27-32
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitened tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but inwardly are full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets, and decorate the tombs of the righteous, and say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we wouldn’t have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.’ Therefore you testify to yourselves that you are children of those who killed the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers.
Lectio
There is a quiet honesty in Paul's boasting today, and it is not really boasting at all. He tells the Thessalonians that he worked night and day, paying for his own bread, not because he had to, but so that his life and his words would match. What he preached with his mouth, his hands confirmed. This is the opposite of the whitewashed tombs Jesus describes — beautiful on the surface, hollow within. Paul's beauty, such as it was, went all the way down. He had nothing decorative to defend because there was no gap between his outside and his inside.
The Pharisees' particular sin is subtle and worth sitting with. It is not that they did great evil; it is that they honored the prophets from a safe distance while resembling the very ones who killed them. They decorated the tombs of the righteous dead precisely so they would not have to hear the living word that would disturb them. We can do the same — admire the saints, quote the holy ones, cherish the demands of the Gospel as long as those demands stay safely in the past or in someone else's mouth. It costs nothing to build a beautiful tomb.
The psalm offers the gentle alternative: *you will eat the labor of your hands.* A blessed life is not an impressive one but an integrated one, where what you do quietly all day is the same thing you claim to believe. That is where peace comes from — the peace Paul prays over them at the end, the Lord of peace himself giving peace at all times in all ways. It is the peace of having nothing to hide.
Where in your life right now is there a gap between the person others see and the person you actually are when no one is watching?
Whose holiness do you admire safely from a distance, precisely because admiring it lets you avoid doing what it would ask of you?
Saint of the day
St. Zephyrinus, Pope and Martyr († 217)
Ora reads this aloud, every morning, free. Ora