22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2026

St Mary’s Cathedral Hobart, 6pm Mass

Welcome to everyone who has joined us to pray this evening. There are moments in the Gospel when Peter seems to understand everything. Last Sunday was one of them. Jesus asked the disciples, “Who do you say I am?” and Peter gave the great answer: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus blessed him for it. Peter had understood something that could only have been revealed by the Father.

Then we come to today’s Gospel, and Peter discovers that knowing the right answer is not quite the same thing as understanding what the answer means.

Jesus begins to explain that he is destined to go to Jerusalem, to suffer grievously, to be put to death and to be raised up on the third day. Peter cannot accept it. He takes Jesus aside and begins to remonstrate with him: “Heaven preserve you, Lord; this must not happen to you.”

We can understand Peter. He loves Jesus. He has left everything to follow him. If Jesus is the Messiah, surely the story should lead towards triumph, not rejection. Surely God’s Anointed should conquer rather than suffer.

Peter knows who Jesus is, but he has not yet learnt the language of the cross.

And Jesus’ response is startling: “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle in my path, because the way you think is not God’s way but man’s.”

That is the great lesson of this Gospel. It is possible to believe in Jesus and still think in ways which are not his ways. It is possible to call him Lord and still resist where he is leading us.

Jeremiah knows something of that struggle. He has been called by God, but the calling has cost him dearly. “You have seduced me, Lord, and I have let myself be seduced.” Because he speaks the word of God, Jeremiah finds himself insulted and ridiculed. Finally, he decides that he has had enough: “I will not think about him, I will not speak in his name any more.”

But he cannot do it.

The word of God becomes for the prophet “a fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones.” Jeremiah discovers that when God has taken hold of a life, we cannot simply put him neatly to one side. There is within us a thirst that the things of this world cannot satisfy.

That is why the response to our Psalm this evening is so beautiful: “My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.” The psalmist speaks of a dry and weary land without water. He knows that our deepest thirst is ultimately a thirst for God.

Perhaps much of our restlessness comes from trying to quench that thirst elsewhere. We look for fulfilment in success or possessions. Yet still the soul thirsts. Beneath all our searching is the God who calls us beyond ourselves.

St Paul tells us what answering that call looks like. “Offer your living bodies as a holy sacrifice, truly pleasing to God.” Christianity is not simply a set of ideas with which we agree. Our faith becomes an offering. Paul then says something remarkably close to the words Jesus speaks to Peter: “Do not model yourselves on the behaviour of the world around you, but let your behaviour change, modelled by your new mind.”

Learn to think differently.

Learn to think as Christ thinks.

That is the conversion Peter still needs. It is the conversion we need as well.

Jesus then turns from Peter to all the disciples: “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

The cross here is not an invitation to go looking for suffering. Christianity does not glorify misery. The cross is what love looks like when love refuses to run away. It is what faithfulness looks like when remaining faithful costs everything.

Sometimes following Jesus will take us along paths we would not have chosen. There will be moments when, like Peter, we would rather tell the Lord how the story ought to unfold. There will be moments when, like Jeremiah, we may even want to walk away.

Yet the fire still burns. The soul still thirsts. And the voice of Christ continues to call.

Tonight we ask that the Lord might rain down his grace upon the dry places within us, so that our minds might be renewed and our thirst might be truly quenched.

For the great paradox of the Gospel is this: “Anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Peter eventually discovered that this was true. He learnt that the cross was not Christ’s defeat but the revelation of how completely God loves us.

We are still learning that language.

And perhaps discipleship begins anew whenever we hear the voice of Jesus Christ asking the question he has asked Christians in every generation: Will you come and follow me?

May we have the courage to answer him.

Most Rev. Anthony J. Ireland
Archbishop of Hobart
30 August 2026