28th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A (October 11, 2026)
Isa 25:6-10a, Ps 23, Phil 4:12-14, 19-20, Matt 22:1-14
I flew home from Athens, which is a beautiful city with ancient ruins still standing and a new airport that has already fallen apart. If you’ve never been through that airport, I’ll save you the trouble. It’s a nightmare. Arrive early. Then, when you think you’ve arrived early enough, consider arriving earlier. We got there around 11:45 for a 3:45 flight. Four hours. We thought we were being responsible adults.
We barely made it.
First, there was a line to check whether you had a valid boarding pass. Not to check in. Just to check whether you had already checked in. That line doubled back on itself so many times that at one point I was walking past myself and considered asking if I had any extra granola bars. You know, like the worst ride at Disneyland. You turn a corner thinking you’re almost there, and another forty minutes of rope opens up in front of you. Except there was no ride. There was another line. Passport control. This line was so long it had two different weather patterns.
We were going to miss the flight. So we did what all mature adults do in a crisis. While looking as pathetic as possible, we begged two staff members who allowed us into the expedited line. (Yes, they knew the problem.) They moved us into a shorter line. Then a shorter one. They walked us past people who had been standing there long enough to start naming sections of the floor after their grandparents.
We made it through passport control. Then came security. That line was mercifully short, because passport control had already brought the airport to a standstill. We boarded. We sat down. We had seats.
You needed a boarding pass to get into the terminal but needed more to get on the plane.
Likewise, in today’s first reading, Isaiah tells us about a feast on a mountain to which all nations are invited. Yet not everyone is there.
Isaiah’s mountain is Zion. The first thing God does there is throw a party. Rich food and choice wines. In Hebrew, the words shemanim and shemarim almost roll off the tongue. You can practically hear the poet smacking his lips.
And it’s for everyone. Isaiah can’t stop saying “all.” All peoples. All nations. Every face. The whole earth. Nobody checks your boarding pass at the bottom of this mountain. The invitation really is for everyone.
God reaches out and removes the veil, the cloth a mourner pulls over their head when someone we love has died. God removes it from every face on earth.
Then God goes after the source of that mourning. In the old Ugaritic stories of the region, Death is pictured as a monster with a mouth so large it can swallow the sky. Isaiah turns the picture upside down: God swallows Death. Then he wipes the tears. And the people on the mountain say, “This is our God. We waited for him.”
Death doesn’t get the last word. Mourning doesn’t get the last word. God does.
Our lectionary reading stops with this joy but Isaiah doesn’t. In the next line, the Lord’s hand rests on Mount Zion, but Moab is trampled like straw in a dung pit. Moab spreads his hands in it like a swimmer. God brings down his pride, along with the defenses in which he trusts.
The Hebrew is deliberately disgusting. Moab is pictured swimming in a pit of filth.
So what does Moab represent? Pride is one of the recurring charges against Moab. Isaiah 16 piles up expressions of Moab’s arrogance and boasting. Deuteronomy remembers that when Israel journeyed out of Egypt, Moab wouldn’t come out with bread and water for a desperate people.
Isaiah describes a feast for all peoples, and Moab appears in a pit. Isaiah never explicitly says Moab refused the invitation. The invitation is universal. Yet, Moab swims in a cesspool. The juxtaposition challenges the simplistic understanding that the invitation is enough.
Pride can’t sit down at a banquet prepared by God. The invitation to that mountain carries a demand. The same voice that says come also challenges us to be transformed by his grace. Listen to his voice rather than our own pride.
The Bible offers another Moabite. A widow named Ruth walked into Bethlehem, the house of bread, and gleaned from the fields. With nothing, she left her own people and gods; she clung to Naomi. She became the great-grandmother of David, and Matthew puts her name in the family tree of Jesus. Ruth models covenantal loyalty.
Today’s Gospel offers a similar contrast. The king’s servants bring in everyone they find on the roads, bad and good, until the hall is full. Then the king walks in and sees one man without a wedding garment. He was invited like everyone else, and he came as he was, and he stayed exactly that way. St. Gregory the Great, reflecting on this passage, noted that he had the faith that opened the door, but he lacked the wedding garment, which is charity—love of God and love of neighbor.
Isaiah puts the two pictures next to each other on purpose. A table for every people on earth. A man drowning in a pit.
The hand of the LORD rests on this mountain. And down below, someone is still swimming without a passport.
