‘The Chosen’ Warns Today’s Priests: Beware the Caiaphas Within

National Catholic Register, 7 October 2025

Season 5 of ‘The Chosen’ echoes Ezekiel and St. Augustine in delivering a stark reminder that even ‘faithful’ shepherds can oppose the Lord they profess to serve.

Lay Catholics, not infrequently, lament the quality of their pastors. But they have nothing on Sacred Scripture, or the Church Fathers — or the Lord Jesus, for that matter. 

Recently, The Chosen has highlighted how much opposition to Jesus came from the clerical establishment of the day.

Every year in September, Catholic clerics get a two-week tongue-lashing in the Liturgy of the Hours (the Divine Office, or “breviary”), which all deacons, priests and bishops are obligated to pray daily. The scriptural passages in the Office of Readings are taken from Ezekiel, an extended denunciation of those prototypical priests: 

Woe to the shepherds of Israel who have been pasturing themselves … you did not bring back the strayed or the lost, but you lorded it over them harshly and brutally (34:2-4).

The Office of Readings includes a second passage, usually from the writings of the saints, often a patristic selection. For the fortnight of Ezekiel, the complement is a continuous reading from St. Augustine’s sermon, On Pastors, where the doctor of Hippo clarifies and sharpens the rhetorical assault of Ezekiel: “He is speaking to wicked shepherds, false shepherds, shepherds who seek their own concerns and not those of Christ.”

The “of Christ” is important. Ezekiel was writing of the shepherds of ancient Israel, long before Jesus and the Christian era. Augustine clarifies that this applies even more forcefully to Christian pastors — primarily wicked, negligent or incompetent bishops, but certainly also to priests and deacons “who seek their own concerns and not those of Christ.”

Those two weeks of sobering selections in the breviary are the 24th and 25th weeks of the year. And they are capped off every third year — the 26th Sunday of Year C in the lectionary — with the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31). Two Sundays ago, all over the world, clerics read aloud that accusatory Gospel.

The primary meaning of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus is evident enough: To ignore the poor and hungry, to avert the eyes and close the heart, is to risk eternal damnation. The rich man of the parable laments his “torment in these flames,” for he paid no attention to the poor man Lazarus at his gate. Jesus confirms the message of the parable in his teaching on judgment in Matthew 25, where those who neglected “the least of these” are condemned to hell.

Yet there is a second level of meaning in the parable, hinted at by the fact that the poor man has a name, “Lazarus.” The parables are meant to teach general lessons, so their characters are generic, without names — the prodigal son, the vineyard owner and the wicked tenants, the Samaritan and the beaten man, the shepherd in search of the lost sheep, the treasure-seeker who purchases the field. The only character in all the parables to whom Jesus gives a name is Lazarus.

Why might that be?

The rich man, realizing that it is too late for him, begs that Lazarus, who is comforted “in the bosom of Abraham,” be sent to his five brothers to warn them of their impending spiritual catastrophe.

[The rich man] said, ‘Then I beg you, father [Abraham], send [Lazarus] to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they too come to this place of torment.’

But Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.’

He said, ‘Oh no, father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

Then Abraham said, ‘If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.’

In due course, a real-life (and really dead) Lazarus would be raised. That led some to faith in Jesus, but for the clerical caste, led by Caiaphas, the high priest, the restoration of Lazarus to life confirmed their conviction that Jesus must die. Their reaction is recorded in John 11:45-53:

Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what he did, believed in him; but some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council, and said, ‘What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on thus, every one will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.’

But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, ‘You know nothing at all; you do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish.’ He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad. So from that day on they took counsel how to put him to death.

That Lazarus has a name in the parable, which prophesies what will happen when the real Lazarus returns from the dead, suggests that perhaps the rich man too has a referent in real life. Reading Luke 16 alongside John 11 suggests that the rich man may well be Caiaphas, the “high priest that year.”

There are some clues. The rich man is described as wearing purple and fine linen, an echo of how Aaron, brother of Moses, was to be dressed as the first high priest (cf. Exodus 28:1-6). Lazarus is at the “gate” of the rich man’s house; an important scene will later take place at the gate (courtyard) of the house of Caiaphas, where Peter is awaiting the outcome of the trial of Jesus (cf. Matthew 26:69).

Continue reading at the National Catholic Register.