TWENTY-SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME, AUGUST 30, 2026
- Maria Knox
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Jesus, St Peter, Keys With Cross Stained Glass St John's Church Scottish Episcopal Church Edinburgh Scotland, late 1800s.
Gospel Matthew 16:21-27
Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.
Then Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him, "God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you."
He turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do."
Then Jesus said to his disciples, "Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life? For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father's glory, and then he will repay all according to his conduct."
REFLECTION
Just last week we were reading the Gospel of Matthew 16:13-20 where Jesus asked His disciples who did people say the Son of Man was, and Peter answered that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus named him Peter and on that rock He was going to build His Church.
Today's Gospel goes over the immediate next few passages, and as soon as Peter hears Jesus say that He is going to suffer greatly, he rebukes Him saying "God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you."
Pope Benedict XVI points that on this passage we can see the difference between God's plan, and the disciples plans and expectations. (Angelus, August 28, 2011).
Jesus is very specific when He says two things in today's Gospel:
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do
Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me
How can we achieve this? How can I think as God does?
Jesus loves us so much, and because of this, He, the God that created the universe became man for our sake. He died a horrible death so we could go to Heaven with Him. So how can I be humble?
I really don't know how, and on top of that, there is this saying that if we ask God to be humble, He will put us in humbling situations. So I'm afraid to ask.
Within the treasures that the Church shares with us, there is a prayer that is attributed to a Cardinal, Merry de Val, who served as the Secretary of State for the Holy See under Pope Pius X. It is called the Litany of Humility. This has been prayed by Catholics since at least the late 1800's, and inspired some of the content of the book the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis:
By this virtue, as by all others, [God] wants to turn [our] attention away from self, to Him and [to our] neighbors... [God] wants to bring [us] to a state of mind in which [we] could design the best cathedral in the world and know it to be the best and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than [we] would be if it had been done by another. [God] wants [us], in the end, to be so free from any bias in [our] own favor that we can rejoice in our own talents as frankly and gratefully as in our neighbor’s talents, or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. [God] wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognize all creatures (even ourselves) as glorious and excellent things…. He would rather [us] think ourselves a great architect or a great poet and then forget about it, than that [we] should spend much time and pains trying to think [ourselves] a bad one.
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