Homily: 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time 

August 30, 2026

My dear brothers and sisters, this theme: “who is Jesus for me and what does His mission mean for me” which we started seeing last Sunday continues in the gospel reading of today. Last Sunday, we saw the general people’s opinion about Jesus: you are Moses, you are Elijah or one of the prophets, then followed by the apostles’ understanding that was acclaimed by Peter, you are Christ the Son of the living God. Today, Jesus is now explaining His mission by Himself. He was very blunt that He would suffer and be killed by the chief priests and Pharisees on the cross and on the third day He would rise again. Interestingly, the same Peter who was praised last Sunday for his faith-filled acclamation of Jesus as God was cautioned today. Jesus in very strong terms told him; get behind me Satan.

From this gospel, we can see that both Jesus and Peter held a different and opposing view concerning the salvation of humanity. Who would be considered correct and who was wrong? For Peter, this thought of Jesus being killed in the hands of the Jewish leaders was not only strange but simply unacceptable. Peter believed that the Messiah would not only never be defeated but would Himself defeat all the enemies of Israel. The rabbis in Peter’s days taught that the Messiah would never die and would begin an era of happiness without end for the just. By human logic and human mindset, Peter was right, a savior who accepts defeat and death even before the battle, is he actually a savior or a failure? Conversely, our Lord Jesus Christ sees this Peter’s insistence on human logic as the handwork of the evil one and a temptation of the devil. It was Satan who tried to tempt Jesus not to follow the way of the cross but to follow the way of earthly glory and power. Jesus sees it that Satan wanted to pull Him down and make Him embrace the crown without the cross and thus not redeem humanity. So, who was wrong and who was right in their different thought patterns, Jesus or Peter?

Perhaps this analogy will shed a little light on the matter. One woman was being troubled by some rats and cockroaches in her house. So, this woman bought some rat poison and mixed the rat poison with some fish and dropped them at different corners of her house. This woman had a pet cat. The pet cat saw these plates of fish mixed with rat poison as sweet, delicious and appetizing plates of food dropped at different corners of the house for her to eat and have merry. However, the woman came with instructions to her pet cat, don’t eat these tempting plates of fish, they will not bring you life, instead they will bring your death, mortify yourself, when I come home after work, I will feed you. The pet cat saw these restrictions and house commandments as agonizing and meaningless. Who was right and who was wrong in this context, the pet cat who beheld an easy mouthwatering banquet or the woman who thought of a more enduring life for her pet?

My dear brothers and sisters, this gospel reading of today invites us not to be like this pet cat. Our life should not begin and end only with the illusive and passing pleasures of the moment. In our spiritual meditations, is good we reflect on why Jesus continues to repeat this message of the cross over and over again. We often hear in the gospel, deny yourself, take up your cross. What does this really mean to us? If Jesus did not waste a second before he called Peter, the head of His apostolic college Satan, when the evil one wanted to distract him from the cross through Peter, we will then know that Jesus is not taking this message of the cross as a joke.

We can recall that in Mt 4: 8-10, when Satan came offering Jesus all the powers, glories, wealth, kingdoms of the earth, Jesus again said the same thing, “get behind me Satan.” This Jesus’ stern approach to the carnal and worldly-minded lifestyle should always be a caveat to us when we adore the glories of world as if they are gods in themselves or even more important than God to us. Experience shows us always that in the end people leave the glories of the world aside and take only themselves for the everlasting journey. By then, if they had degraded themselves so much that even the self is lost, the regret would be very bitter, total and eternal because the world is lost and the other world is lost too.