Commensurators of normal subgroups of lattices

We study a question of Greenberg-Shalom concerning arithmeticity of discrete subgroups of semisimple Lie groups with dense commensurators. We answer this question positively for normal subgroups of lattices. This generalizes a result of the second author and T. Koberda for certain normal subgroups of arithmetic lattices in SO(n,1) and SU(n,1).