Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Intention: For students returning to Lasallian schools this week, that they find in their classrooms teachers who know their names and expect good things of them.
Today’s 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.”
From the Seventh Meditation for the Time of Retreat | Saint John Baptist de La Salle
There is no need to be astonished if the first bishops of the early Church, and if the holy apostles, had such an esteem for the function of instructing the catechumens and the new Christians, and if Saint Paul especially gloried in being sent to preach the Gospel, not with learned words, for fear that the cross of Jesus Christ would be destroyed, since God turned the wisdom of the world into folly.
Prayer
Eternal Father, Peter tried to talk your Son out of the cross and was told he was thinking as human beings do. We would have said the same thing. Give us the sense to notice when our concern for someone is really our wish to avoid what is hard. Teach us what it costs to follow, and let us go anyway. We ask this of you who lives and reigns with your Son and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.