Jesus, the Word made flesh, makes known God’s thoughts and will.  He shows us what it means to think as God and to be true to God’s thinking. 

Peter confesses, yes, that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God.  For the Father has granted him to think as God.

But later, Peter stops to think as God, and Jesus tells him this to his face.  And he calls Satan the one he has proclaimed blessed before, since he cannot bear the thought of a suffering Messiah.

Indeed, God’s thinking is not human thinking; as heaven is higher than the earth, so are divine thoughts higher than human thoughts.  Still and all, it is clear that Jesus teaches us to think as God.

That is why we have to be men and women of the Gospel (TWVDP 150).  Only thus do we learn from him who is wholly true to what God thinks and wants.  We also are to ask time and again what he would do if he were in our place (SV.EN XI:314).

And to think as God means to turn things upside-down.  That is, to take self-denial, the cross—weak, foolish, shocking for humans—as strong, wise, saving.

In other words, to learn to think as God is to learn to lose life, like Jesus, to save it.  Hence, we must not let “to have more always” make slaves of us.

For to seek increasingly our material well-being leads increasingly to dehumanization, perdition, destruction. As we insatiably seek so, we leave the world increasingly unsafe, unhabitable, unsustainable.  We also hinder the communion of love from taking hold of us.  And we need this communion if we are all to enjoy peace and justice. 

Lord Jesus, grant us to think as you do and to be true to your thinking.  And, like Jeremiah, let us find strength to announce the Good News to the poor.  To the point of giving up our bodies and shedding our blood.  We will thus offer ourselves to God as a living sacrifice.  And deliver us who make up the Church from all “me-ism.”

30 August 2026
22nd Sunday in O.T. (A)
Jer 20, 7-9; Rom 12, 1-2; Mt 16, 21-27