Thinking as God Thinks and Entering Into His Logic, Twenty-Second Sunday (A), September 3, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
September 3, 2023
Jer 20:7-9, Ps 63, Rom 12:1-2, Mt 16:21-27

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• There’s a dramatic turnaround from last week’s Gospel. As we saw seven days ago, Jesus called Simon Peter “the Rock on whom I will build by Church” and promised that “the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.” Today, Jesus calls Peter, “Satan,” and tells him, essentially, that the gates of Hell are prevailing against him. Why? Because Peter was refusing that Jesus would suffer, be killed and be raised: “God forbid it, Lord!,” he shouted. “This must never happen to you!” We might think that this was just the concern of a friend trying to prevent Jesus from suffering harm, but Jesus, the Lord, saw something much deeper. The reason why he called him “Satan,” was because Peter at that moment was, without realizing it, playing the part of Satan the tempter, effectively trying to steer him away from doing his Father’s will of giving his life out of love to save ours. The reason why Jesus said, “Get behind me!,” is because Peter was trying to lead Jesus rather than to follow him, and no creature can ever do that to the Creator, and no disciple can ever do that to the Master. Jesus very directly summed up what was the cause of Peter’s fall: “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”
• As challenging as that was, Jesus then upped the ante. It was tough enough to accept “the way God thinks” when that meant that the “Christ, the Son of the Living God” (as Peter confessed him last week) was going to undergo great suffering and be crucified. But Jesus said that if we wanted to be his disciples, we would need to do the same. This is God’s standard for us, too. “If anyone wishes to become my disciple,” Jesus tells us at the end of today’s Gospel, “he must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.” We obviously desire to be the Lord’s true disciple. We pray for and want our fellow priests and religious, our family members and friends, and all those we serve to be true be disciples of Jesus. But we and they cannot be Jesus’ disciples unless we do what he indicates — deny ourselves rather than affirm ourselves, pick up our Cross daily, and follow Jesus rather than doing our own thing, which means thinking as he thinks, willing as he wills, choosing as he chooses, serving as he serves and loving as he loves.
• Paul echoes Jesus’ call to begin thinking according to God’s logic rather than our own in today’s second reading. “Do not conform yourselves to this age,” he wrote to the Romans, “but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good, pleasing and perfect.” His words lead us to come face-to-face with one of the most important issues in the spiritual life: Do we think as other human beings do and conform ourselves, our thought patterns, our way of life, to the customs and expectations of the world and of our age? Or do we seek to think as God does, to discern what his will is, and to allow him to renew our minds with his holy wisdom?
• This is especially true about the Cross. St. Paul says his words about not conforming ourselves to this age immediately after he urges us, by God mercies, to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, our spiritual worship. Spiritual worship is an insufficient translation of the words St. Paul uses in his Greek original, “logike latreia,” something that is better rendered “the only worship that is logical,” “the only adoration that makes sense.” The sole response to all that God has done for us is to give of ourselves wholly and entirely. Our worship, as Pope Benedict wrote back in 2006, is meant to be a “total self-offering … [that] includes and transfigures every aspect of life.” The worship God wants of us is not simply making time for prayer, acts of charity and not breaking the commandments. The only worship of God that makes sense is for us to offer all we are and have to God, to deny ourselves anything we selfishly desire, to die to our ego, and to follow Christ freely along a path of total self-giving, of making of ourselves a holy, pleasing, living sacrifice to God and in him to others. It’s to live a cruciform life. When we begin to think as God does, this is what a Christian thirsts to do.
• This is a huge challenge in every age. 2000 years after Jesus’ crucifixion, we are not shocked as St. Peter was when Jesus gave the first of three prophecies of what would happen to him on Good Friday, because we know that it turns out well three days later. But most of us are still shocked when Jesus says to us that in order to be his disciple we must deny ourselves, die to ourselves through the Cross and follow him along the path to death in order to live. And we’re even more shocked when Jesus asks those we care about to follow him along the path of suffering. We are tempted to say, “God forbid, Lord, that any such thing as pain and suffering, of the Cross, happen to me or my loved ones!” Because we struggle to think as God thinks, we’re tempted to water down what Jesus says are preconditions to being his follower. Jesus’ first listeners would never have missed what he was saying when he mentioned that the only way they could follow him is through denying themselves to the extent that they would pick up their Cross. It would be as if he said to us today, “Strap yourself into the electric chair!,” because in the ancient world, the cross was used exclusively for the gruesome capital punishment of crucifying someone. For Jesus to say that they needed to pick up the Cross and follow him meant that they need to die to themselves on the Cross just like Jesus did on his. As St. Paul, who picked up his cross every day after his conversion and followed the Lord, once wrote: “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:19-20), Jesus wants us to be able to say the same thing. It’s only when we have denied ourselves and affirmed God, it’s only when we have in fact died to ourselves so that Christ may live, it’s only when we’ve “lost” our life for the sake of Christ and his Gospel, that we will “save” our life and be able to follow Christ to the joyful risen existence he suffered and died to give us. This is certainly not man’s wisdom, but it is God’s wisdom!
• What this is all about is that if we’re going to live as a Christian, if we’re going “to discern God’s will, what is good, pleasing and perfect,” we need to grasp and live the meaning of Christian suffering. Those who are conformed to the world do not understand suffering. They thinks it’s exclusively an evil to be eliminated in the pursuit to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, but a Christian looks at suffering not simply as pain but as suffering that can redeem us and others. The world looks at the Cross as a way of abnegation, of giving up good things, of losing out on good experiences, but a Christian sees it not so much as a path of renunciation and agony, but a way to unleash love, to make us humble and form us to be Good Samaritans when we see others suffering. The way of the Cross is fundamentally a yes, not a no .Just as by Christ’s stripes we were healed (Is 53:5), so by our own stripes, our own crosses, we can make up what is lacking in Christ’s sufferings for the sake of his body the Church (Col 1:24).
• Jesus — great teacher that he is — sums up the contrast between God’s wisdom and man’s when he says, “For what would it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?” So many in our day strive after money, power, pleasure and prestige. Jesus is telling us that even if we were able to have all of these in abundance and more, it wouldn’t be worth it if in the process we squandered our soul. This is the great “Faustian bargain” — to use the image from the 19^th century German poet Goethe — the quintessential temptation of the devil. Just as Satan tried to tempt Jesus in the desert when he took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and said, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me,” so Satan tries to do the same with us. Jesus’ response then is what he wants ours to be now, “Away with you, Satan, for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve Him alone’” (Mt 4:8-10). That’s the reason why Jesus called Peter “Satan,” because Peter was tempting Jesus to put his physical health and temporal well-being ahead of his and our eternal well-being, to live for the present rather than forever — just as Satan tried to do to Jesus in the desert. Jesus makes plain that it profits a person nothing to gain everything the world can offer if he forfeits his eternal life in exchange. Rather than hungering and thirsting for mammon, for power, for pleasure, for fame, the Christian says, in the words of today’s Psalm, “My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord, my God,” “for you my flesh pines and my soul thirsts like a dry weary land without water.” We recognize that God is the pearl of great price worth selling everything else we have to obtain, worth even enduring the Cross to embrace.
• This is a difficult transition. If we think as God thinks and live as God wants, we will suffer. It certainly was for Jeremiah. He said, “I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me… for the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long.” We will occasionally experience the same derision because of our conformity to Jesus and dissent from worldliness. If we are united to Jesus in his teaching about the dignity of every human being and say together with Jesus and the Church that it is always and everywhere wrong to murder an innocent child made in his image and likeness in the womb through abortion, people will curse us as being mysognist and of “waging a war on women.” If we’re united to Jesus in his teaching about marriage, that it is the lifelong fruitful and faithful union of one man and one woman, we will be accused by some judges, politicians and celebrities of being “homophobic bigots,” even though we as Catholics ardently love our brothers and sisters with same-sex attractions and sacrifice ourselves for their salvation. If we’re united to Jesus in his teaching that whenever we welcome a stranger, we welcome him, and treat immigrants, whether they’re legal or illegal as if they’re brothers and sisters, many will accuse us of being “anti-American.” Our conformity to Jesus’ counter-cultural teachings will bring us, like Jeremiah, to be reviled, to have people utter all types of things falsely against us on Jesus’ account, but Jesus tells us today, paradoxically, that this path of self-denial, this way of the Cross, this following him down the trail of truth, is the way to life. We will experience what Jeremiah mentioned at the end of today’s first reading, that “if I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” A truly Christian conscience is like that burning fire in our bones compelling us to give witness to the truth of God’s wisdom. And if we do so, then we may experience some suffering like Jeremiah, but we will also be like him an instrument of conversion and hopefully salvation of others.
• This path of the renewal of our minds so that we might begin to think as God thinks, this way to satiate Jesus’ thirst and ours, this path of self-denial, assumption of the Cross and following Jesus even and especially when it’s hard, is something we cannot just think about or hope happens to us. It’s something for which we need to prepare and something we have to choose freely, something for which we thirst like a desert for water, and burn from within our bones. Just as Jesus, looking ahead to what would happen to him on Calvary, said in his Good Shepherd Discourse, “No one takes my life from me; I freely lay it down,” so each of us is not supposed to be a “victim” of the Cross but someone who eagerly and freely lays down our life in accordance with divine logic for God and for others.
• And the way we are helped to grow in making that “total self-offering that includes and transfigures every aspect of life” is here at Mass. It’s here that God seeks to renew our minds with the holy Word of God. It’s here that we offer our bodies to God as sacraments of our entire being, body and soul. The prayers of the Mass are explicit elaborations of the “logike latreia” that St. Paul mentions. During the offertory, the priest prays that “this sacrifice, yours and mine, will be acceptable to God, the Almighty Father.” Later the priest asks God the Father “to bless, acknowledge and approve this offering in every respect [and] make it spiritual and acceptable” (EP I) as we offer him “in thanksgiving this holy and living sacrifice” (EP III). This points to the truth that it’s through this Eucharistic self-giving together with Jesus that we’re strengthened to live our life in conformity to Him rather than to the world. It’s here where we gain the strength to choose him over every other thing in the world combined and to have his very own life ignite us from within like fire in our bones to go with him and help him save the world.
• Let us ask God the Father today to give us all the help he knows we need to think the way he thinks, to discern his holy will and do it, to be willing to sacrifice everything for him, so that we may not be called “Satan” but “beloved sons and daughters,” as we seek to meet his thirst with our thirst, and to give him here at Mass and throughout the liturgy of our life the only worship that makes sense, the total holocaust of ourselves to him and for others in response to his love in giving himself totally for us and our salvation. This is what it means to conform ourselves to the way God thinks. This is the way of true and thorough renewal. This is the means by which we gain more than the whole world.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Whenever I speak, I must cry out,
violence and outrage is my message;
the word of the LORD has brought me
derision and reproach all the day.

I say to myself, I will not mention him,
I will speak in his name no more.
But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones;
I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it.

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.”

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