The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity

This is the Gospel epilogue to Isaiah’s Book of Comfort, following the Suffering Servant of chapter 53 and the restoration of Zion in chapter 54. It opens with hoy, a particle that everywhere else in the prophets announces woe and death; here, in its last appearance in these chapters, God turns it inside out into a street vendor’s welcome: “Hey! You there!” Why weigh out silver (shaqal) for what is not bread and spend your toil (yegia’) on what does not satisfy? Come buy wine and milk without money. God then promises to cut an everlasting covenant, using an emphatic cohortative (’ekretah, “I surely will cut”), and hands over the chasdei David hanne’emanim, the faithful mercies once pledged to David alone.

This is the only mention of David in Isaiah 40–55, and St. Paul quotes it in Acts 13:34 to preach the resurrection of David’s greater Son. Seek Him “while He allows Himself to be found” (behimmatze’o): God is not hiding, He has drawn near in Word and Sacrament. Free pardon offends human reason, which is exactly the point of verses 8 and 9.

Paul sets pagan worship and Christian liturgy side by side. Walk “carefully” (akribos), a word for strict conformity to a standard, and buy back the time (exagorazomenoi ton kairon), since kairos is not the ticking clock but the opportune moment, and the days are evil. Then the contrast: do not get drunk with wine, which was not simply a vice but the engine of Dionysian religion, but “be filled up in the Spirit” (plerousthe en pneumati). Christians need no wine to manufacture ecstasy; the Spirit fills them through the Word.

That single imperative drives three participles describing what a Spirit-filled assembly looks like: speaking and singing to one another in psalms, hymns, and songs of the Spirit; giving thanks (eucharistountes, the word the early Church soon attached to the Supper itself); and ordering oneself under the neighbor (hypotassomenoi) in the fear of Christ. The frame is Trinitarian: filled by the Spirit, offered in the name of the Lord Jesus, directed to the Father, and the last participle is a hinge, turning the liturgy straight into the household duties that follow.

This is the third and fiercest of three parables aimed at the leaders in Jerusalem days before the crucifixion, and the stakes rise from a vineyard to a royal wedding. The guests are “those who had been called” (keklemenous, a perfect passive: they were already on the list), and they simply were not willing. The king had prepared an ariston, a feast begun in the morning and meant to run all day, with fattened cattle slaughtered for it. Some drift off to their businesses; others murder the messengers. The king’s answer breaks the frame of any ordinary dinner story, burning a city, a chilling anticipation of Jerusalem in AD 70.

Then the servants are sent to the crossroads and gather “both evil and good,” which is how the hall gets filled: not by merit but by grace that goes to the margins. The man without a wedding garment is addressed as “Friend” (hetaire), the word Jesus uses for Judas, and he is speechless. He is cast into the outermost darkness, where the gnashing of teeth is not shivering regret but rage; the condemned go on hating the Son. Many are called, few are chosen: the invitation is free and universal, and the garment is Christ’s own righteousness, given, never brought.