Reflection for Sunday – October 11, 2026

Sr. Joan Sobala, SSJSunday Readings Homilies

Readings:  Isaiah 25: 6-10a; Philippians 4: 12-14, 19-20; Matthew 22: 1-14 
Preacher: Sr. Joan Sobala

When we really want to celebrate someone or something special, we most often come together around a meal. Meals are central to our way of thinking and acting when important moments arise. When we need to welcome someone home, celebrate a milestone, honor a union, form a bond, marry and bury, remember and renew, we gather at the table. 

Meals are rich in symbolism. They are signs of acceptance, friendship, love and joy.  Signs of unity. We don’t usually invite someone we distrust or dislike to a meal. Indeed, if we do invite them, it may signal that the dislike or distrust is being broken down. Not surprisingly, reconciliation also calls for a meal of celebration. Think about the father in Jesus’ parable about prodigals who is delirious with joy because his wayward son came home. 

Celebratory dinners are different from grazings, often the stuff of receptions marking civic or business event. Grazing people don’t sit down for long, if at all. They move from person to person, from grazing station to grazing station. The snippets of conversation are glue that holds the event together, but the experience is vastly different from the loving, relaxed, long meal that enhances the bonds that unite us and linger in our memories.  

We can pass up a reception to a civic or community or business event, but It is a sign of rejection and an insult to refuse an invitation to a special dinner with its many layers of meaning. 

The symbolism of a meal is nothing new. It would have been just as familiar to the people who listened to Jesus’ parables as it is to us today—probably more so, for they would have been raised with the image of God’s kingdom as a banquet, as we see vividly in today’s first reading. 
 

The chief priests and the Pharisees of the people couldn’t fail to get the message that they were the ones who had rejected the invitation. Jesus’ parable 

for us today holds valuable truths about ourselves and who are called to the banquet table of the Lord.  

First of all, we are invited along with lots of other people. In the parable, the servants were told to bring in anyone they could find to celebrate—the good and bad alike—and that’s the way it is. We can’t choose our table companions at God’s banquet, nor are there tables for one in the kingdom. 

In reading the Gospel, we are tempted to be dismayed at the host, who casts out the person without the wedding garment. But listeners of the parable in the early church would have known that the host always provides a wedding garment for those who didn’t have one.  All are provided for. What this incident shows is a person who rejects the generosity of the host.

The biblical commentator William Barclay talks about “the garments of the mind and of the heart and of the soul— the garment of expectation, the garment of humble penitence, the garment of faith and the garment of reverence. These are the garments without which we ought not to approach God.” 

The second takeaway in our readings today that the invitation of God is an invitation of joy. Both Isaiah and Matthew talk of great joy in connection with the kingdom. We miss joy if we say no to the invitation. 

I’m not sure how many of us really believe that God invites us to a joyful celebration. Like the folks in today’s Gospel, some Christians say no to the invitation and go off to find joy, happiness, sunshine, fulfillment elsewhere. All these other experiences are good in themselves, but they fall short as replacements for the joy of being at God’s table. They never satisfy the deepest longings of our hearts.  

When we accept God’s invitation to the banquet, if we accept Jesus’ story of the wedding banquet as our own, our lives will be different. Compassion and kindness will make us capable of reaching out to others who are welcome at the table, even as we are. 

So let’s put on the wedding garment offered. Let ‘s rejoice and be attentive to one another. Together, we have been chosen. 

Sr. Joan Sobala, SSJ
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