SCRIPTURE READINGS
Twenty-second Sunday, August 30, 2026  

Biblical Readings Online Here 
(Year A in the three-year cycle of readings)   

Last week’s confession of Peter was the turning point in Matthew’s Gospel: Peter acknowledged that Jesus was Messiah and Son of the living God, and Jesus delegated to him authority over the Church (16:1-27). But only moments after, Jesus informed his disciples that he must journey to Jerusalem to suffer and be killed. Peter’s objection provoked an angry rebuke: “Get behind me, Satan! . . . You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” The church is founded at the cost of Jesus’s life. Jesus declares, “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.”

How do you “lose” your life in order to “find” it? Romans, the second reading, teaches us how to extend our “morning offering” to the whole day and extend our altar offerings to daily life. St. Paul’s readers would have been familiar with liturgical language and ritual from Jerusalem temple worship and the civic rituals of the Roman Empire. Below is Paul’s text in Romans 12:1-2 with key words italicized or explained in brackets.

“I urge you therefore, brothers and sisters,
by the mercies of God”  

• • • [we worship at God’s invitation];  

“to offer your bodies”  

• • • [your social and physical existence including relationships; human action is conceived as bodily organs functioning, eyes and ears receiving impressions, and hands, mouth, hands, legs, and feet functioning as instruments of the self;]  

“living sacrifice”  

• • • [living humans in contrast to dead animals];  

“holy and pleasing to God”  

• • • [“pleasing,” i.e., accepted by the deity]; 

“your spiritual worship”  

• • • [Greek logikē = highly conscious; the one who offers knows well the God who is worshiped];  

“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.”  

• • • [the present age is passing away, to be replaced by the gospel proclamation of the new age] 

Romans 12:1-2 expresses the ideal response to “the gospel of God, which he promised previously through his prophets in the holy scriptures.”

Richard Clifford, S.J., has taught biblical studies for 55 years, most recently at the Clough School of Theology and Ministry, Boston College, and has written many scholarly and popular books and articles.