Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B (2026) - Fr Robert Krishna, OP

You can almost see the feast in Isaiah’s description, the table laden with food, and wine, rich, expensive and delicious food and wine. This is quite usual for a wedding feast in most cultures, like the feast in today’s Gospel parable. There are oxen and fat calves, and much more, as befits a wedding feast flowing with rich wine lasting for many days. After all, it is the wedding feast of a king’s son. The mystery is why the guests turned away. Did they think they could have had better elsewhere? Or did they not trust the King? Or perhaps, they expected that they were going to be tricked into giving an expensive return banquet or gift, which they couldn’t afford, because invitations to banquets in some cultures carry with them the obligation to make an appropriate gift in return. Ultimately, the Gospel doesn’t tell us. Perhaps, it was some combination of all these. What we do know is that the refusal and the violence of it brings down the king’s vengeance, and then an opening up of the wedding feast to everyone on the streets, good and bad alike. But finally, we see one of those men who have been dragooned into the feast thrown out because he lacks a wedding garment.

What should we make of this strange parable? The story is meant to suggest the relationship between God and his people, Israel. In the Scriptures, we see God’s repeated generosity towards Israel, how he goes out of his way to invite them to enter into his kingdom, and how again and again, his people turn away from him, refuse to trust in him, and prefer to focus on their business or seek after other gods. The prophets God sends are ill-treated and put to death. And Israel is repeatedly attacked by outsiders, until in the end, in 70 AD, the temple is completely destroyed, as Jesus foretells implicitly here, and explicitly later in the Gospel. And in Jesus and his Church, the invitation to the relationship with God is opened up to all the people of the world. And finally, in the man who did not wear his wedding garment, a warning is given to each of us: We are being told: “Just because you have been brought into this great banquet, do not presume that you can just sit back and watch. You need to consider where you are and act appropriately.” So far so good. The parable can be seen as a morality play about the history of Israel, and a warning to Christians.

But there is a lot more to this parable. After we’ve said that God is the king, the townspeople who refuse to come to the feast represent Israel, the wedding feast the relationship with God, the people brought into the feast the gentiles, and the man without the wedding garment the Christian who does not bother to change his life, there is more to say. Parables are put before us, not to give us mental puzzles where we can place other people as pieces in them, but so that we can see ourselves and our own responses to God in them, and turn back to God ourselves.

Because God is generous to us too. As he did with the people in the parable, God is immeasurably generous to us. As we remember in today’s opening prayer, God sends his grace to go before us, and follow after. He not only warns us through his messengers, the prophets and the saints. The Son to whose wedding we are invited is not absent or implicit as he is in the parable. That Son came personally to humanity, became a man like us in every way but sin. Having become a man, that son shared the fate of the servants, being insulted and put to death. And rising from the dead, he offers his people a chance to repent. And this wasn’t just something that happened two thousand years ago to someone else. Christ is present to us personally, intimately through the sacraments, and through his grace calling us to conversion. What he serves us here is not earthly meat and wine, but the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Our God, our host, becomes for us, our feast. The wedding garment is given to us in baptism. All we need to do is to wear it and come to the feast. But we too, like those originally invited, can often refuse, for many reasons: whether it be because we do not trust God, or believe that someone else can give us something better, or because we suspect God wants a price from us that we are not willing to pay. Or we can become careless and forget the importance of not just being Christians, but living as Christians. We can forget to keep praying each day. We can become complacent and forget to come before God appropriately dressed in our virtues, and bringing him our own gifts of good deeds. We can even turn aside from him and prefer our own gods, wealth or power or fame or sex or entertainment, the applause of friends or the continual satisfaction of our appetites. Even at this stage, God does not abandon us, if we are willing to turn back. Even if we lose this garment by committing sin, we can come back to God in the sacrament of reconciliation. In this Mass, and in all the sacraments, in our life of prayer, in our daily struggle against sin, in our daily efforts to do good works, God calls out to us, personally: Come in, then, to the banquet of rich food and fine wine, to the altar from which God will nourish us and make us sharers of his own divine nature, where we will go from being guests of God to his friends, and ultimately, his children, on account of whom the wedding banquet will be given.

Fr Robert Krishna, OP teaches Biblical Studies at Holy Name of Mary Seminary, Honiara, Solomon Islands and is currently assigned to St Laurence's Priory, North Adelaide, South Australia.