Thirsting for God and Striving to Think as He Does, 22nd Sunday (A), August 30, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
August 30, 2026
Jer 20:7-9, Ps 63, Rom 12:1-2, Mt 16:21-27

To listen to an audio version of this homily, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• Anyone who prays the Liturgy of the Hours loves today’s Psalm. It’s the one the Church has us pray every other Sunday morning and during Morning Prayer on any Solemnity or feast. It describes the most fundamental human desire and is an essential characteristic of every Missionary of Charity: thirst for God in response to his thirst for us. We pray, “O God, you are my God whom I seek. For you my flesh pines and my soul thirst like the earth, parched, lifeless and without water. Thus have I gazed toward you in the sanctuary, to see your power and glory, for your kindness is a greater good than life. … My soul clings fast to you; your right hand upholds me.” Last Friday, we celebrated the feast of St. Augustine, who famously wrote at the beginning of his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” His young life, as we know, took many detours. He looked for God in various ancient philosophies, in oratorical brilliance, in the pleasures of the flesh, but he didn’t find what he was seeking. He wrote in the Confessions, “In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you. … You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.” St. Augustine wrote what he did, among other things, so that we could learn from his mistakes. He wants us to grasp that we’ve been made by God for God and that even the best things of the world, apart from God, will ultimately never satisfy. God wants to pour his living water to quench our existential thirst.
• For us to act on that fundamental desire for God, no matter how many years we’ve lived as a Christian and the public promises or vows we’ve made, most of us need some level of conversion. St. Paul talks about the new life we need in today’s second reading, when he tells the ancient Christians in Rome and Christians in every era: “Do not conform yourselves to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.” And that renewal of our minds is meant to lead to the renewal of our hearts and the renewal of our whole life. That is pointed to in the dramatic scene in today’s Gospel. Last Sunday, Jesus called Simon Peter “the Rock” on whom he would build his 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.” Peter needed a renewal of his mind, to grasp how the way of the Cross was not a contradiction to the will of God but the culmination of that divine plan. Likewise Peter, the other apostles, and almost every Christian since, has needed a renewal of the mind with regard to what Jesus said immediately after. It was tough enough to accept “the way God thinks” when that meant that the “Christ, the Son of the Living God” 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. “If anyone wishes to become my disciple,” Jesus tells us forthrightly 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 and have by now sought to be for decades. We pray for and want our fellow priests and religious, our family members and friends, and all those we serve to be true 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. Jesus’ 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 conform ourselves to God’s thoughts, ways and holy will?
• This challenge 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. 2,000 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! Teresa of Calcutta wanted you, Sisters, to live by this wisdom. As we ponder her at this time of year in which we celebrate her earthly birthday (August 26), her eternal birthday (September 5) and the inspiration God gave her to quench his thirst and be his light (September 10), it’s important for us to ponder even more her thoughts on the Cross where Jesus thirsted in his divinity and humanity. In your Constitutions, she wrote and you live, “The Cross will be for us as it was for Christ: proof of the greatest love. Jesus alone, God made man, could fully understand the meaning of sin and suffer from it. The force with which Chirst was drawn to the Cross in expiation for the sin of mankind must urge us as spouses of Jesus Crucified to accept voluntary nailing with Christ on the Cross, in a spirit of love, obedience and reparation for our own sinfulness and that of the world, especially our poor.”
• 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 and in our city 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.
• But making the choice to embrace the Cross is never going to be easy. This summons to become like God can sometimes be bitter. We see that bitterness in the first reading. The Prophet Jeremiah, as you remember, was called as a teenager to be the prophet of the Lord. He tried to get out of it by saying he was too young, but God told him he wasn’t to young and lacked eloquent, but the Lord told him, “Say not, ‘I am too young.’ To whomever I send you, you shall go; whatever I command you, you shall speak. Have no fear before them, because I am with you to deliver you.” Then he placed his words in Jeremiah’s mouth. But as soon as Jeremiah starting calling God’s people in Jerusalem and Judah to conversion, he suffered for it. People mocked him. Some even tried to kill him. He felt like there were people set out to entrap and harm him on every side. He gave witness to it in today’s first reading, complaining, “You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped. … All day long I am an object of laughter; everyone mocks me. … The word of the Lord has brought me derision and reproach all the way.” If we choose to unite ourselves to Christ, live fully as a Christian, and share the Gospel by words and example, we will, just as Jesus promised, similarly experience some suffering. That suffering, or even the fear of it, may tempt us to stay silent, sit on the sidelines or even be tempted to abandon Jesus’ way. Jeremiah was tempted in that direction. But then we see what happened to him. He recognized he couldn’t. He wrote, “I said to myself, ‘I will not mention him, I will speak his name no more,’ but then it became like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned within my bones; I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it.” We see that in his life, as he continued to proclaim God’s word. We see it in St. Peter’s, who, after being called Satan and summoned to conversion, ended up giving the supreme witness to Christ and the Gospel. We see it in the life of St. Paul, who after persecuting Christians spent the rest of his life trying to make Christians, once exclaiming, “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel!” We see the same thing in so many saints, both the famous ones we celebrate in the liturgical calendar (like the one we’ll celebrate on Saturday) as well as the saints next door, who are intrepid witnesses to the integrity of the Gospel and true love of God and neighbor. The Lord today wants to make our bones burn with a desire for others to come to know God, to thirst for him, to seek his will and to live it.
• 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 for 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 what Pope Benedict called “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: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download