28th Sunday 2026
Isaiah 25: -10a; Philippians 4: 12-14, 19-20; Matthew 22: 1-14
“I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.” Literally, “I have strength for all things through Him who empowers me”.
You are going to have two for the price of one today. I would like to talk first about the Letter to the Philippians, and secondly about the First Reading and Gospel in tandem.
“I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.” When I was in the middle of a particularly bad depressive bout, a brother priest, himself congenitally depressive, quoted that line to me as something which he had found helpful. I would just gloss it slightly. I would suggest that God does indeed give us strength—particularly the strength to endure—but that it is He who actually does the heavy lifting.
To quote another scriptural line, this time from the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) “God will do the fighting for you. You have only to keep still”. Sometimes, we try too hard to get things right: we overstrain. As far as possible, we need to “let go and let God” as the saying goes. We need to bring our needs to God, and lay them on Him, allowing Him to deal with them. In due course, He will show us how we need to act, empowering us to do so in His own good time. Until that time becomes obvious, let us leave it to God.
Thus, that Reading offers us encouragement, which we so often need. Meanwhile, the First Reading and Gospel promise us nourishment, but also send us a warning.
Isaiah the prophet promises us a share in the Messianic Banquet, and in victory over death. He proposes to God’s people, who are potentially ALL people, as he twice suggests—referring to the covering that is cast over ALL peoples, the veil that is spread over ALL nations—that they will sit down with the Messiah on the holy mountain to a “feast of rich food, a feast of well aged wine”.
That is indeed something to relish, especially if there is real ale drawn from the wood to complement the wine.
Our Lord, in His parable, likens this banquet to a wedding feast given by a ruler for his son. Jump quickly to the Book of Revelation (the Apocalypse), and we find “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb”. Where will we enjoy that feast? In Heaven, clearly, but where else? Here, in the Mass, where we have a foretaste of that feast, where we are told “Blessed are those who are called to the Supper of the Lamb”. Already, in every celebration of the Mass, we share in the Messianic Banquet, the wedding feast of the King’s Son, who is joined to His Bride, the Church: a marriage feast in embryo here, as its glory is not yet.
But then comes the warning—or rather, the warnings. The people originally invited miss out on the marriage feast. We can take that on the surface as a reference to the Jewish people, who refused to accept the invitation offered by God, through Jesus. We are the beneficiaries, the rag tag and bobtail mass of Gentiles, who are gathered in from the highways and byways, and led to the marriage feast.
Yet, if we go deeper, we can see that we have no room for complacency. Think of a literal marriage feast. When I was in a parish, I avoided such things like the plague, unless they involved close friends, though I did well out of one evening “do”, where I had gone to “hang my teeth out”, briefly, as a former parish priest used to express the process of wandering round with a fixed smile, attempting to be agreeable to people. As I was leaving, a couple of young men were waiting for a taxi which had declined to appear. I offered them a lift, and at the end of the journey, they insisted on giving me the taxi fare.
So, if invited to an earthly marriage feast, we might have good reason to send excuses, though not to shoot or stone the messenger—but we aren’t. It is the marriage feast of God’s Son, so we have a responsibility to attend, and to provide ourselves with a wedding garment—in other words, to make an effort; to live in such a way as to be worthy of the invitation. We may have been invited at the last minute, but we do need to scrub up.
