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Thirty-Third Sunday of the Year
17 November 2007
The Third Principle of Evangelical Catholicism is:
“The seven Sacraments of the New Covenant are divinely instituted instruments of grace given to the Church as the ordinary means of sanctification for believers. Receiving the Sacraments regularly and worthily is essential to the life of grace, and for this reason, faithful attendance at Sunday Mass every week (serious illness and necessary work aside) and regular Confession of sins are absolutely required for a life of authentic discipleship.”
The most common excuses offered by lapsed Catholics for not going to Mass every Sunday include the following standards: “It’s boring. I don’t get anything out of it. I can pray anywhere. I feel closer to God when I’m outside in nature. I find the crowd distracting. I don’t like the music. The preaching is bad.” But even if all of these complaints are true, they are also utterly irrelevant. “Remember to keep holy the LORD’s Day” is not a suggestion; it’s a commandment, and it’s a commandment which does not include room for evasion of a sacred duty simply because fulfilling that duty is not to our taste. When we skip Mass without a just cause (such as serious illness or absolutely essential work), we break a commandment of God and commit a grave sin against the holiness of God. For this reason, a Catholic who misses even one Sunday Mass (or Holy Day of Obligation) without just cause is by that fact no longer in full communion with the Lord Jesus and His Church and is deprived of the justifying grace which makes us children of God. This is why one who has missed Mass on the LORD’s Day must be reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance before he or she may again worthily receive Holy Communion. But even if we believe all of the above, it is reasonable to ask why God demands this service of us.
In the first chapter of his letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul teaches us that we exist to live for the praise of God’s glory. This is a bold claim: We exist to praise God, and until we do that in divine worship according to the eternal plan revealed in Jesus Christ, we are not living a whole or a holy human life. To put it in other words, a person who has not acquired the liturgical habit of giving thanks to God in the Most Holy Eucharist does not yet understand why he exists or how to find his eternal destiny. From the creation of the world, the Seventh Day was set aside for us from ordinary occupations so that we could share in the covenantal worship which completes and perfects our humanity, and the Passover meal of Israel was set by God as a perpetual remembrance of their deliverance from slavery so that they would never return to the condition of slaves. In his passion, death, and Resurrection, the Lord Jesus transformed the Passover of the Old Covenant into the New and Everlasting Covenant, and the Day of Resurrection (which is both the first day and the eighth day—the pluperfect sign of the New Creation) became the LORD’s Day on which we share each week in the Passover of the Lamb of God. This, then, is why we should hasten to the assembly of God’s Church each and every week on the LORD’s Day: to be nourished unto everlasting life as we fulfill the saving precept of the Lord Jesus, “Do this in remembrance of me.”
Father Newman