The Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time (2026)

Have you ever been driving somewhere and had your GPS tell you to turn when you were absolutely certain it was wrong? You know the road. You know where you're going. You know the route you usually take. And you hesitate, because what the GPS is telling you doesn't fit with what you think you already know.

Sometimes, of course, we are right. But sometimes we have to admit that the person following the map is the one who has to trust that there is something he or she cannot yet see.

There is something similar happening in this Sunday’s First Reading and Gospel.

The First Reading gives us Jeremiah, a prophet who has spent years proclaiming God's word to a people who do not want to hear it. He has warned them about what is coming, and now the future he has proclaimed is becoming reality. Jerusalem will fall. The temple will be destroyed. The people will go into exile.

This is not the future Jeremiah would have chosen for his people. And yet his faithfulness requires him to remain with the truth God has entrusted to him, even when he cannot see what will come next.

And that brings us to Saint Peter.

Now, Jeremiah and Peter are separated by centuries, but they find themselves in a similar place. Both have a genuine relationship with God. Both are trying to be faithful. And both encounter a future that does not fit the future they had imagined.

Peter has just made a profound profession of faith. He has recognized Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus praises him, gives him a new name, and tells him that he will be the rock upon which he will build his Church.

And then, almost immediately, everything changes.

Jesus told his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, suffer, be killed, and be raised on the third day. Peter cannot accept it: “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.”

But Peter's response makes perfect sense. He loves Jesus. He has seen the extraordinary things Jesus has done. Everything seems to be moving in the right direction. Why would Jesus willingly walk toward suffering and death?

But Jesus responds with some of the harshest words he ever speaks in the gospels: “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me.”

It is important to notice what Jesus tells Peter to do: Get behind me… In other words, Jesus tells Peter Follow me.

And that is important, because Peter has begun to reverse the relationship between teacher and disciple. He has decided what Jesus' path should look like, and he is trying to tell Jesus where that path should lead.

Peter—the rock—has become a stumbling stone.

And that is where this Gospel begins to speak very directly to us about discipleship.

We can know Jesus. We can love Jesus. We can sincerely believe that we understand what God is asking of us. And still, there are times when our own understanding of what should happen becomes so certain that we stop following and start trying to determine the path ourselves.

That is one of the difficult things about discipleship. It asks us to let go of our preferred picture of the future.

We know something about this in our own lives. A relationship ends, and the future we imagined with someone we love disappears with it. We experience a broken heart and have to learn to live with a future we never chose. A child makes choices we cannot understand, and the future we imagined for them is no longer the future they have chosen for themselves. We build a career and discover that circumstances take us somewhere we never intended to go. We receive a diagnosis that changes the plans we had made for the years ahead.

Sometimes the disappointment is less dramatic: something we had hoped for simply never happens.

In those moments, faith does not require us to pretend that we understand. But it does ask us to surrender the future we had imagined and become free enough to ask, “Where are you leading me now?”

That does not mean surrendering our hopes, our intelligence, our experience, or our legitimate desires. It means surrendering the claim that our vision is the final measure of what is possible or desirable. And that can actually make us free.

If I believe that everything has to conform to my expectations, then I have to control everything. I have to know what comes next. I have to make sure that the future looks the way I think it should look.

But if Christ is leading, I can become free enough to ask a different question: Lord, where are you leading us now?

Peter's resistance to the Cross reveals how difficult that freedom can be. We want to trust Christ, but we also want to know where he is leading and why. Pope Saint Paul VI described this impulse as one of the “sins of self-sufficiency” that Christ seeks to eradicate from the human heart. Sometimes self-sufficiency is not simply believing that we can do everything ourselves. It is believing that we know exactly how our lives should unfold.

Discipleship asks us to surrender that certainty—not because our hopes and desires are unimportant, but because Christ sees more than we can see.

That is what Peter cannot yet understand. He can see suffering and loss. He cannot yet see what will come after the Cross.

But we know something Peter did not yet know: the way of the Cross leads into a garden and an empty tomb. The darkness of Good Friday is followed by the light of Easter morning.

That does not make the Cross easy. But it does mean that the Cross is not the end of the story.

And this is why even a difficult passage like today's Gospel is Good News. Jesus is not asking us to forge a new path to God. That work has already been done by the one whom we follow. We are being asked to trust him enough to follow where he leads, even when we cannot yet see where the road is going.

There will be moments when that means letting go of something we thought had to happen. There will be moments when our plans change, when our expectations are disappointed, or when the future looks different from what we imagined. There will even be moments when we have to admit that something we sincerely believed was best may not be what Christ is asking of us.

Those moments can feel like loss. But they can also become moments of freedom.

Because the disciple does not have to know the whole road.

The disciple does not have to control the destination.

The disciple has to remain close enough to Christ to hear his voice and willing enough to follow.

Jeremiah could not see what lay beyond exile. Peter could not see what lay beyond the Cross. Neither was asked to possess the whole picture. They were asked to remain faithful to the God who was leading them. And so are we.

The invitation of the Gospel is not simply to believe in Christ. It is to put ourselves behind him, to let him lead, and to become free enough to follow.

We may not know exactly where the road will take us. But we know who is leading us.

And that is enough.