Everything Is Ready

When most of us turn God down, it’s because we had something else going on. A game that runs long, a deadline at work, a Saturday that eats into Sunday, a vague sense that Mass is one more appointment on a crowded calendar. Ask a Catholic who drifted away from the altar why he stopped going, and you rarely hear an argument against the faith. You hear about a schedule that has too much on it. Today’s Gospel has a phrase for that individual: the invited guests “made light of it and went off, one to his farm, another to his business.” Underneath the schedule sits a quieter suspicion, that what God offers is a duty dressed up as a gift, that his table will be thin and real life happens elsewhere. Isaiah answers that suspicion before Jesus ever tells the parable. On God’s mountain the table holds “a feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees,” and the host means to do more than feed his guests. He will tear away the veil spread over every nation, swallow up death for ever, and wipe the tears from every face. Then Jesus tells the chief priests about a king who throws a wedding for his son, sends word that “everything is ready,” and watches his guests find reasons to stay home.

Every excuse they gave was respectable. And one guest who did come never bothered to change his clothes.

Today is the Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, and the Lord’s Day takes the place this year of the optional memorial of Saint John XXIII, the pope who opened the Second Vatican Council on this date in 1962. He spent his life inviting people in. So here’s the question these readings put to you and me: do we believe the feast is ready, and are we dressed for it?

The Readings

First Reading: Isaiah 25:6-10a

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wine on the lees well refined. And he will destroy on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death for ever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth; for the Lord has spoken.

It will be said on that day, “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”

For the hand of the Lord will rest on this mountain.

Gospel: Matthew 22:1-14

And again Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a marriage feast for his son, and sent his servants to call those who were invited to the marriage feast; but they would not come. Again he sent other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, Behold, I have made ready my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves are killed, and everything is ready; come to the marriage feast.’ But they made light of it and went off, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them. The king was angry, and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city. Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore to the thoroughfares, and invite to the marriage feast as many as you find.’ And those servants went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

“But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment; and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.”

Scriptural Analysis

Today’s first reading comes from the stretch of Isaiah, chapters 24 to 27, where the prophet looks past the ruin of the nations to the day God reigns on Mount Zion. The Navarre commentators note that chapter 25 opens with a song of thanks to the God who “protects the weak and casts down the proud of heart.” The song then turns into a menu. “The Lord has prepared a special feast for all the nations on Mount Zion,” they write, with “succulent food and fine wine,” a symbolic reference to divine fare that “surpasses anything that man could imagine.” The Hebrew word for the feast is mishteh (mish-TEH), a drinking feast, the kind thrown for a wedding. And notice the guest list: “all peoples.” Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary on Isaiah, explains why the prophet keeps saying “this mountain”: “for it was there that Christ suffered, from which all good things come forth to us.” Then he reaches straight for today’s Gospel to describe the food: “behold, I have prepared my dinner: my beeves and fatlings are killed” (Matthew 22:4).¹ Thomas read Isaiah 25 and Matthew 22 side by side seven centuries before the Lectionary paired them.

Then the host goes to work on his guests. “He will destroy on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death for ever.” Aquinas says death is called a bond “inasmuch as we are bound to it from sin, and a web inasmuch as it is a just sentence woven by God.” The shroud over the nations is the sentence of death itself, and the host of this feast cuts it away. The Navarre editors point out that Saint Paul quotes this verse when he rejoices that Christ’s resurrection “marks the definitive victory over death” (1 Corinthians 15:54-55), and that Revelation borrows the next line for the Lamb who died and rose: “he will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4).² The Church still prays Isaiah’s sentence at the altar. In the third Eucharistic Prayer she asks for the dead to share God’s glory “when every tear will be wiped away,” and the Catechism quotes that prayer to show what every Mass is waiting for.³

The Navarre commentators read the passage forward to the Eucharist: “These words prefigure the eucharistic banquet, instituted by Jesus in Jerusalem, in which he provides divine nourishment, his own Body and Blood, which strengthens the soul and is a pledge of future glory.” Thomas, true to form, finds three feasts in “a feast of fat things”: the family feast of the Church militant, the private feast of the soul, and the solemn feast of the heavenly court. The first is the altar, where he tastes both the bitterness of the Lord’s death proclaimed (1 Corinthians 11:26) and the sweetness of the bread from heaven “having in it all that is delicious” (Wisdom 16:20). The Catechism calls the Eucharist “an anticipation of the heavenly glory,” the sacred banquet in which “a pledge of the life to come is given to us.”⁴ Isaiah’s feast on the mountain has a time and a place. It is at your local parish this morning.

Now the Gospel. Jesus is still in the Temple courts, answering the chief priests and Pharisees, who have just figured out that his last two parables were about them (Matthew 21:45). Daniel Harrington notes that this one is aimed at the same audience. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri set the scene: “One can hardly imagine a happier occasion than a marriage celebration.” Here “the Father is the king who wants us to celebrate the coming of his Son with a marriage banquet,” the Son who had already called himself the bridegroom (Matthew 9:15). Saint Gregory the Great, in the Catena Aurea (kah-TAY-nah OW-ray-ah) of Saint Thomas, names the bride. The Father made this feast for his Son “when He joined to Him the Holy Church in the mystery of His incarnation,” and “the womb of the Virgin Mother was the bridechamber of this Bridegroom.”⁵

Mitch and Sri explain the double invitation. By custom a host sent word once to ask guests to keep the date, then again when the meal was on the table: God sent the prophets to prepare for the Messiah, then the apostles to announce that the feast was ready. Harrington says the word for the meal is ariston (AR-is-ton), which specifically refers to the noon meal. Thomas notices that the first call promised nothing, while the second spells out the menu, and he calls it “an increase of kindness” on the part of the one inviting, met by “an increase of malice on the part of the ones excusing themselves.”⁶

Some guests “made light of it.” The rest seized the servants and killed them, and the king’s troops burned their city, which Mitch and Sri, with most scholars, hear as an allusion to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. Harrington adds a warning worth keeping: this verse must never become an indictment of the whole Jewish people, because “the target of the parable was (some) ‘chief priests and Pharisees.’” It’s the excuses that the people gave that should catch us. Running a farm or a business is honest work. Saint John Chrysostom, in the Catena, grants the point: “These occupations seem to be entirely reasonable; but we learn hence, that however necessary the things that take up our time, we ought to prefer spiritual things to every thing beside.” Thomas agrees: “Exteriorly, they seem to have a just cause, but the Lord does not accept it, because no temporal things should hold one back from coming to God.”⁷

Then the king widens the guest list: “Go therefore to the thoroughfares.” Harrington says the word, diexodos (dee-EX-oh-dos), most likely means the place where a street runs out through the city boundary into open country, so the servants have to make a real effort to find the new guests. Thomas hears last Sunday’s first reading in the king’s voice. “The marriage indeed is ready” means “the Son is incarnate,” and he quotes Isaiah’s vineyard song: “what is there that I ought to do more to my vineyard, that I have not done to it?” (Isaiah 5:4). The servants gather “both bad and good,” and Harrington says the phrase prepares for the next scene, in which “mere admission to the kingdom is not enough to guarantee staying in it.”⁸

The king comes in and sees a man with no wedding garment. Mitch and Sri admit that no clear evidence survives of special wedding clothes in Jewish antiquity; the likeliest picture is clean clothes in place of soiled work clothes, since guests summoned at the last minute “would still be expected to change into their Sunday best.” The garment, they say, is “the one thing necessary, in addition to an invitation.” The first guests “were not worthy,” and the word is axios (AX-ee-os), the same word John the Baptist used when he demanded “fruit that befits repentance” (Matthew 3:8). So the garment is “the righteousness that comes with repentance.” They quote Saint Jerome, for whom the wedding garments are “the Lord’s commands and the works that are fulfilled from the Law and the Gospel. These become the clothing of the new man.”⁹

Thomas gives the shortest answer of all: “What is this garment? Christ.” We put him on in the sacrament, “for as many of you as have been baptized in Christ, have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27), and we keep him on by charity: “to have a wedding garment is to put on Christ through good works, through a holy life, through true charity; and if one of these is lacking, it is bad.” The Church dresses every newly baptized Christian in white for exactly this reason. The Catechism says that “having become a child of God clothed with the wedding garment, the neophyte is admitted ‘to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’”¹⁰

“Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?” Harrington notes that Matthew uses hetaire (heh-TIE-reh), friend, when the speaker already knows the answer and is putting the other man on the spot. It’s the word Jesus will use for Judas in Gethsemane (Matthew 26:50). The man “was speechless,” and Thomas explains why: “a sinner cannot have a sufficient reason why he has scorned a wedding garment.” Then the closing line, “many are called, but few are chosen,” and Thomas names the two ways to miss the feast: “some do not wish to come, and some do not have a wedding garment.”¹¹

Put Isaiah and Matthew side by side, and Thomas’s instinct holds. It’s the same feast. On Zion, God spreads rich food for all peoples and tears away the shroud of death. In the parable, the King’s Son is the bridegroom, the oxen are killed, and “everything is ready.” Two things keep a person out: staying home, and coming in unchanged.

Daily Application

The interior movement these readings ask for is to believe the Lord’s invitation, and then to dress for it. Mitch and Sri name three dangers in this parable: indifference, indignation, and incomplete conversion. Indifference is the temptation most of us face, and it looks like a farm and a business; the honest work Chrysostom granted was reasonable. Their description of it fits a lot of Sunday mornings: we “quietly decline the invitation and go back to our personal pursuits as though nothing has changed.”¹² Start there. Today is Sunday. Go to the feast, and go as a guest. Get there a few minutes early, put the phone away, read Isaiah 25 in the pew, and when the priest lifts the Host and says, “Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb,” hear your own name in that call of the Lord.

Then look at the garment. The man without one, Mitch and Sri write, “wanted the good things of the kingdom, but not enough to break with his sinful ways and live as a committed disciple.”¹³ That’s the danger for those of us who never miss Mass. We came in, but did we change? If you’re carrying a serious sin, take it to confession before you come back to the altar. The sacrament is how the baptized get their white robe clean. Finally, run down the rest of Thomas’s list: a holy life, true charity. Name one person you’ve been withholding charity from, and settle it before next Sunday.

Saint John XXIII knew both halves of this parable. Franciscan Media remembers a farmer’s son from Sotto il Monte who joined the Secular Franciscans in the seminary, carried stretchers in World War I, and as a papal diplomat helped save an estimated 24,000 Jewish people. At the opening of the Council he said that the Spouse of Christ “prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity.”¹⁴ That’s the king sending his servants out past the city gate to bring in everyone they find. The same pope titled his great social encyclical Mother and Teacher. A mother brings you in from the road, and a teacher shows you how to live once you’re inside.

Be one of the servants, too. There is somebody you love who is standing at the edge of town, convinced the feast isn’t for them. Invite one person to Mass next Sunday. Offer to drive them if that is what it takes to get them to come.

Everything is ready. Come to the feast, put on Christ, and bring someone in from the crossroads with you.

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Notes

1. ↑ The Navarre Bible, Old Testament, commentary on Isaiah, by members of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Navarre (Dublin: Four Courts Press; New York: Scepter Publishers, 2005), 126-127; Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, trans. Louis St. Hilaire (Green Bay, WI: Aquinas Institute; Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2021), chap. 25, no. 589.
2. ↑ Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, chap. 25, no. 590; Navarre Bible, commentary on Isaiah, 127.
3. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1404.
4. ↑ Navarre Bible, commentary on Isaiah, 127; Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, chap. 25, no. 594; Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1402.
5. ↑ Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 305; Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 281; Saint Gregory the Great, quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 1, St. Matthew (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1841), on Matt 22:1-14.
6. ↑ Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 281; Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 306; Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, trans. Jeremy Holmes (Lander, WY: Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2013), C. 22, L. 1, nos. 1759-1760.
7. ↑ Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 281-282; Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 306, 308; Saint John Chrysostom, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, St. Matthew, on Matt 22:1-14; Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, C. 22, L. 1, no. 1762.
8. ↑ Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 306; Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, C. 22, L. 1, no. 1766.
9. ↑ Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 282-283; Saint Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, trans. Thomas P. Scheck, Fathers of the Church 117 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 250, quoted in Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 283.
10. ↑ Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, C. 22, L. 1, no. 1770; Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 1243-1244.
11. ↑ Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 306; Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, C. 22, L. 1, nos. 1772, 1775.
12. ↑ Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 283-284.
13. ↑ Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 284.
14. ↑ “Saint John XXIII,” Saint of the Day, Franciscan Media, accessed October 6, 2026, franciscanmedia.org.

Books Cited

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• University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets (Four Courts Press, 2005)
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, trans. Louis St. Hilaire (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2021)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday / Image)
• Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Liturgical Press, 1991)
• Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2010)
• Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, trans. Jeremy Holmes (Aquinas Institute, 2013)