What We Owe God

Justice is the virtue in which we give to God and others what we owe them. Well, what do we owe God? Everything. At least we owe it to him to live Sunday the way he asked. In fact it is a grave act of injustice against God to skip Mass on Sunday unless you are contagious or taking care of someone. Why is this?

Imagine I was never home, I never had a meal with my family. One day my wife says, “You know we haven’t seen you for weeks. Could we all sit down together at a meal as a family, just once this week?” And I roll my eyes and I say, “Ugh, sure. Fine. Alright, if it’s that important to you, fine, when?” And she says, “I don’t know, on the weekend, you know, when you’re not working?”

“Alright, fine, when do you want to do it?”

And my wife says, “We can build this family meal around your schedule. We could do 4 PM Saturday? We could do an early breakfast Sunday? We could do lunch at noon or even supper Sunday night?”

And I say, “Yeah, uh, don’t ask me to commit to one of those. I’ll show up to one of those, alright?”

And then the weekend goes by and I don’t show up to this one meal with my family that they’d asked me to come to, that they’ve made as convenient as possible for me to show up to. I don’t come and my wife sees me later and she says, “Hey, what happened? I thought we were set, why, I mean, did you get sick? Did you get in a car accident? Was there some emergency?”

And I say, “Oh, no. There was just some other stuff and I didn’t really wanna come to the meal.”

That would be a relationship killer. That is what we mean when we say skipping Mass without a serious reason is a mortal sin. A relationship killer.