A reflection on the Mass propers for Saturday, 26 September 2026
Sabbato Quattuor Temporum Septembris — II classis — Commemoratio Ss. Cypriani et Justinæ Virginis, Martyrum
Veníte, adorémus Deum, et procidámus ante Deum: plorémus coram Dómino, qui fecit nos: quia ipse est Dóminus, Deus noster. “Come, let us adore God, and fall down before God: let us weep before the Lord that made us: for He is the Lord our God.” — Introit, Ps. 94:6-7
I. Liturgical Context
The September Embers close today. Wednesday and Friday have been kept; Saturday gathers the whole week into one long Mass, the old Sabbatum in duodecim lectionibus, which in the Roman usage once ran through the night into Sunday and was the Church’s chosen hour for conferring Holy Orders. The present rite preserves the shape of that vigil: five lessons from the Old Testament, each followed by a gradual and a prayer, the canticle of the Three Children in the furnace, and only then the Epistle and Gospel. The day ranks as a liturgical day of the second class; the saints of the Sanctorale yield to it, and Saints Cyprian and Justina, whose feast falls on this date, are kept by commemoration.
What governs everything is the month. The Ember fast of September is the ieiunium mensis septimi, the fast of the seventh month, and the Church has never pretended otherwise. The first two lessons are taken without apology from Leviticus 23: the tenth day of the seventh month, the Day of Atonement, when Israel was to “afflict your souls” and the high priest passed behind the veil; and the Feast of Tabernacles, when the people dwelt seven days in booths “that your posterity may know, that I made the children of Israel to dwell in tabernacles, when I brought them out of the land of Egypt” (Lev. 23:43). St. Leo the Great, who preached on this fast year after year, teaches that the Church received the observance of the seventh month from the Law and keeps it now in its fulfilment, joining fasting to almsgiving so that the body’s abstinence becomes the poor man’s bread (Sermones de ieiunio septimi mensis, Serm. 86–94).
Atonement and Tabernacles, the veil and the booth: those are the two images the Mass has placed in our hands before the Epistle is even announced. The Epistle then tells us what the veil was for, and the Gospel tells us what the Lord of the tabernacle does when He comes down into His vineyard.
II. The Epistle — Hebrews 9:2-12: Semel in sancta
The Apostle begins with an inventory, as if walking the reader through the tent in the wilderness. There is the first tabernacle, “wherein were the candlesticks, and the table, and the setting forth of loaves, which is called the holy.” And “after the second veil, the tabernacle, which is called the holy of holies,” with its golden censer and the ark, and in the ark “a golden pot that had manna, and the rod of Aaron, that had blossomed, and the tables of the testament” (Heb. 9:2-4).
Into that inner room “the high priest alone, once a year: not without blood” (9:7). This is exactly the Day of Atonement the first lesson has just described, and the Apostle draws the conclusion that the whole arrangement was a sign of its own insufficiency: “the Holy Ghost signifying this, that the way into the holies was not yet made manifest, whilst the former tabernacle was yet standing” (9:8). And then he uses a word that the Church, in placing this Epistle beside today’s Gospel, surely did not overlook. The tabernacle, he says, “is a parable of the time present” — parabola est temporis instantis (9:9).
The Old Law was itself a parable. It told the truth, but in figures; it pointed, but could not bring anyone through. Its sacrifices “can not, as to the conscience, make him perfect that serveth” (9:9). Then comes the turn on which the whole Epistle hangs:
“But Christ, being come an high priest of the good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hand, that is, not of this creation: neither by the blood of goats, or of calves, but by his own blood, entered once into the holies, having obtained eternal redemption.” (Heb. 9:11-12)
Christus autem assistens pontifex futurorum bonorum, per amplius et perfectius tabernaculum non manufactum… per proprium sanguinem introivit semel in sancta, æterna redemptione inventa.
What is this “greater and more perfect tabernacle”? St. John Chrysostom, in his homilies on this epistle, understands it of the Lord’s own flesh: a dwelling not built by human hands but formed by the Holy Ghost, through which the Son passed as through a veil into the true sanctuary (In Epistolam ad Hebræos, hom. 15–16). St. Thomas, commenting on the chapter, gives both readings the tradition had received, the tabernacle as Christ’s body and the tabernacle as the heavens through which He passed, and shows that they agree: the humanity is the way, and heaven is the place to which the way leads (Super Epistolam ad Hebræos, c. 9). The Apostle himself will say it plainly a chapter later: we enter “by a new and living way which he hath dedicated for us through the veil, that is to say, his flesh” (Heb. 10:20).
Two words carry the weight. Semel, once: not once a year, as the high priest of the Law, but once for all, because what is offered is not the blood of goats but the Son’s own. And æterna redemptione inventa, having found eternal redemption. The Latin is striking; the redemption is something the High Priest goes in and obtains, as a man goes into a treasury and comes out with the price. St. Thomas gives the reason why no other priest is needed: Christ is at once priest and victim, and His priesthood has an eternal effect because the offering is of infinite worth (cf. Summa Theologiae III, q. 22).
One detail of the inventory deserves a second look before we leave the tent. Among the things kept behind the veil was virga Aaron quæ fronduerat, the rod of Aaron that had blossomed (Num. 17:8): a stick of dead wood, cut from its root, that in one night put out buds and flowers and ripe almonds. In the holy of holies there lay a piece of barren wood made fruitful by the presence of God. The Gospel is about to set another barren tree before us.
III. The Gospel — Luke 13:6-17: The Fig Tree and the Daughter of Abraham
The fig tree that has had three years
“A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it, and found none” (Luke 13:6). The owner has come for three years; he commands that the tree be cut down: “why cumbereth it the ground?” And the dresser of the vineyard answers: Domine, dimitte illam et hoc anno — “Lord, let it alone this year also, until I dig about it, and dung it. And if happily it bear fruit: but if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down” (13:8-9).
The Fathers read the three years in more than one way, and the readings enrich rather than compete. St. Augustine, preaching on this very Gospel, takes them as the three ages of man’s history: God sought fruit from the human race before the Law, under the Law, and now in the time of grace, and the present time is the last year of patience (Sermo 110). St. Gregory the Great, in a homily on the same pericope, follows the same division and presses its urgency: the axe is not yet laid, but it is lifted (Homiliæ in Evangelia, hom. 31). St. Ambrose, reading the tree as the Synagogue, sees three visits of the Lord seeking fruit: in Abraham, in Moses, and in Mary, that is, in the sign of the covenant, in the Law, and in the flesh (Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, VII).
On the digging and the dung, the Fathers speak with one voice, and it is a humbling one. St. Gregory takes the digging about the roots to be the correction that lays bare a soul’s condition, and the dung to be the remembrance of its sins, which, unpleasant as it is, is precisely what makes the ground fruitful again; the sinner who recalls his foulness with sorrow is being manured for harvest. St. Augustine says much the same in his own manner: the basket of dung is the sorrow of the penitent, and a man who does penance does it, so to speak, in the midden, but it is from there that fruit comes. Venerable Bede, gathering both, transmits the reading to the whole medieval West (In Lucæ Evangelium expositio, IV).
Who is the vinedresser? Here too the tradition holds two readings together. Gregory sees in him the order of those set over the Church, the pastors who intercede for their flocks and labour at their roots. Others among the Fathers see in him Christ Himself, the one Intercessor who stands between the Owner’s justice and the barren tree and asks for time. Read in the light of today’s Epistle, the second reading is irresistible: the vinedresser who pleads dimitte illam et hoc anno is the High Priest who has gone into the holies “always living to make intercession for us” (Heb. 7:25). And the first reading is not thereby cancelled, because on this very day, the Ember Saturday of ordinations, the Church has for centuries sent new vinedressers into the vineyard to share in that intercession and that digging.
The woman who could not look up
Then Luke sets the parable in motion. On a sabbath, in a synagogue, “there was a woman, who had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years: and she was bowed together, neither could she look upwards at all” — erat inclinata, nec omnino poterat sursum respicere (13:11). Jesus calls her, says, “Woman, thou art delivered from thy infirmity,” lays His hands on her, “and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God” (13:12-13).
St. Gregory, in the same homily, reads her as every soul that thinks only of earthly things and does not seek the heavenly: bent over toward the ground, able to see nothing but what lies at its feet. She is the fig tree seen from another angle. The barren tree does not bear; the bent woman cannot look up; both are the human creature turned in upon the earth from which it was taken. St. Augustine draws the same line and names its remedy in the words the Church still sings before the Canon: Sursum corda. The woman made straight is a soul whose heart has been lifted up to the Lord.
Note also how the healing is done: by a word and by the laying on of hands. St. Cyril of Alexandria, commenting on this Gospel, observes that the Lord could have healed by a word alone but chose also to touch, to show that His holy flesh is itself life-giving, the flesh of the Word in which the divine power dwells bodily (Commentarius in Lucam, on 13:10-17). That is the Epistle’s “tabernacle not made with hand,” reaching out to touch a crippled woman in a synagogue on the sabbath.
The ruler of the synagogue is indignant. The Lord answers him with the plainest of arguments: you will loose your ox or your ass on the sabbath to lead it to water, “and ought not this daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?” (13:16). Solvere and solvi ring through the sentence: loosing, unbinding. The sabbath was given as a figure of rest, and the true rest has come; what could be more fitting to the day than the release of a captive? And Luke ends not with the ruler but with the people: “all his adversaries were ashamed: and all the people rejoiced for all the things that were gloriously done by him” (13:17).
It is worth noticing that the Church reads this Gospel on a Saturday, the sabbath itself, at the close of a week of fasting. The Lord is again in the synagogue on the sabbath, and the bent are again being called.
IV. Synthesis — The Pontiff Who Came Out to Dig
St. Thomas teaches that all things come forth from God and all things return to Him, and that Christ, in His humanity, is the way of that return (Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, prologue). Today’s Mass lays the pattern out in two movements that fit together like the two parts of a single gesture.
The going forth (exitus) is told by the Gospel. The Owner of the vineyard comes seeking fruit; the Vinedresser comes down to the root, into the dirt and the dung, to dig; the Lord of the sabbath comes into the synagogue and lays His hands on a woman bent double. God does not wait at the top of the tree for the fruit to be handed up. He descends to the ground where the barren and the bent are, and He works there with His hands.
The return (reditus) is told by the Epistle. The same One who stooped enters “once into the holies,” passing through the veil of His own flesh, carrying His own blood, and finding eternal redemption. The woman “made straight” and glorifying God is the first fruit of that entrance: a creature that could not look up, now looking up, and following the gaze of her Healer into the sanctuary. Sursum corda is not a mood; it is the posture of a soul that has been drawn after the High Priest behind the veil.
The hinge between the two movements is the word parable. The Law, says the Apostle, was a parabola temporis instantis; the Gospel opens with a similitudo. Both are true figures of the same reality, and the reality is this: that God has granted the barren tree one more year, not by relaxing His justice, but because Someone has gone into the holies with blood and is interceding there. The “one year more” of the parable and the “once for all” of the Epistle are not in tension. The semel of the sacrifice is the reason for the hoc anno of the patience. Every year of grace we are given is purchased time, bought at the price of the æterna redemptio the Pontiff found.
And then, lest we presume, the Epistle’s inventory returns to warn us. Aaron’s rod blossomed in the holy of holies because it lay in God’s presence. The fig tree was given a year, if happily it bear fruit: but if not. The patience is real, and it is not endless. That is why the Church fasts in the seventh month.
The commemoration: a magician loosed
The saints of the day make the whole argument visible. The account of Cyprian and Justina, preserved in the Greek Acts and in the so-called Confession of Cyprian, is of the kind that historians handle with care, and it should be read as a received tradition of the Church rather than as a documented chronicle. According to it, Cyprian of Antioch was a sorcerer given over from youth to the service of demons; hired to break the resolve of a Christian virgin named Justina by his arts, he found every power he summoned turned back by her prayer and the sign of the Cross. Seeing the demons he served put to flight by a girl, he renounced them, burned his books, was baptized, and, the tradition holds, was at last beheaded for Christ together with Justina under Diocletian. St. Gregory Nazianzen preached a panegyric on Cyprian at Constantinople (Oratio 24), though in doing so he blended him with his great namesake of Carthage, which tells us how early and how widely the story was loved.
Whatever the historian must leave uncertain, the Church knew exactly why she set these two in her calendar beside this Gospel’s season. Here is a man “whom Satan hath bound” for far longer than eighteen years, loosed. Here is a barren tree, long past the three years, dug about and manured by the humiliation of his own defeat, bearing the fruit of martyrdom. And here is a daughter of Abraham, a virgin whose only weapon was the Cross, that is, the sign of the blood by which the High Priest entered the holies. The commemoration Collect asks that their continual protection may cherish us, since God does not cease to look with favour on those He has granted such helpers.
V. Devotional Application
The September Embers ask three things of the faithful, and this Mass gives each a concrete form.
Examine. Where am I the barren tree? Not in general, which is too easy to admit and forget, but in the particular place where God has been coming for “three years” and finding leaves: the resolution renewed every Lent and never kept, the prayer begun and abandoned, the vice confessed and nursed. And where am I bent over, able to see nothing but what lies at my feet: the anxiety, the screen, the ledger, the grievance? Name it. The woman was healed when she was called forward, not while she stayed in the crowd.
Do. Accept the dung. The Fathers are unanimous that the remembrance of one’s sins, made in sorrow, is what makes the ground fruitful. Go to confession before the next Ember season, and do not make it tidy. Then keep something of the Ember fast today, even though the Church no longer binds us to it; St. Leo would have you join it to an alms, so that what you deny yourself goes to someone who has less.
Pray for the vinedressers. Today is the ancient day of ordinations. Pray by name for the priests who have dug about your roots, and for the men being ordained or preparing for Orders this year. Gregory’s reading and the Epistle’s meet here: the priest shares in the intercession of the one High Priest, and he needs your prayer to do it.
Look up. At Mass, when the priest says Sursum corda, make the answer deliberately: Habemus ad Dominum. Let the posture of the healed woman be the posture of the heart.
VI. The Collects
Oratio (after the canticle of the Three Children):
Deus, qui tribus púeris mitigásti flammas ígnium: concéde propítius; ut nos fámulos tuos non exúrat flamma vitiórum. Per Dóminum.
“O God, who didst temper the flames of fire for the three children: mercifully grant that the flame of vices may not consume us Thy servants. Through our Lord.”
Commemoratio Ss. Cypriani et Justinæ:
Beatórum Mártyrum Cypriáni et Justínæ nos, Dómine, fóveant continuáta præsídia: quia non désinis propítius intuéri, quos tálibus auxíliis concésseris adjuvári. Per Dóminum.
“May the continual protection of Thy blessed Martyrs Cyprian and Justina cherish us, O Lord: for Thou dost never cease to look with favour upon those whom Thou hast granted to be aided by such helps. Through our Lord.”
The first prayer is worth pausing over in the light of the Gospel. The Three Children were bound and thrown into the furnace, and the fire burned only their bonds; they walked loose in the flames. So the daughter of Abraham was loosed from Satan’s bond, and so the Church asks that the fire of this life may burn away what binds us without consuming us.
VII. Aspiration
Dómine, dimítte me et hoc anno, et fode circa me. “Lord, let me alone this year also, and dig about me.” (after Luke 13:8)
Or, with the whole Church before the Preface:
Sursum corda. — Habémus ad Dóminum.
VIII. For Further Study
This Mass opens onto several of our paths at once.
The Sacred Liturgy path takes up the Ember Days as a whole: their Roman origin, their correspondence to the four seasons and to the feasts of Israel’s seventh month, the twelve-lesson Saturday vigil and its connection with ordinations, and what the calendar lost when the Ember observances were made optional.
The Theology and Doctrine path treats the priesthood of Christ in the order of St. Thomas: why Christ is at once priest and victim, what it means that His sacrifice is offered semel, and how the ministerial priesthood shares in His one priesthood without adding to it. The Epistle to the Hebrews is the Scriptural spine of that study.
The Lives of the Saints path offers Cyprian and Justina as a case in how the Church reads a tradition whose history is uncertain but whose meaning is not, and sets them beside other converts from the occult arts.
The East-West Comparative thread notes that these martyrs belong to the undivided Church; the Byzantine calendar keeps them as well, and Gregory Nazianzen’s panegyric is among the earliest witnesses to their cult.
IX. Source Transparency
Scripture is quoted from the Douay-Rheims, with the Vulgate given where the Latin carries the argument. Liturgical texts follow the 1962 Missale Romanum. Patristic teaching is rendered as faithful paraphrase with the locus indicated, not as direct quotation: St. Leo the Great, Sermones de ieiunio septimi mensis (Serm. 86–94); St. John Chrysostom, Homiliæ in Epistolam ad Hebræos (PG 63); St. Augustine, Sermo 110 (PL 38); St. Gregory the Great, Homiliæ in Evangelia, hom. 31 (PL 76); St. Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, VII (CCSL 14); Ven. Bede, In Lucæ Evangelium expositio, IV (CCSL 120); St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentarius in Lucam; St. Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio 24 (SC 284). St. Thomas is cited from the Summa Theologiae at the level of the question, and from his commentary on Hebrews by chapter.
The account of Saints Cyprian and Justina rests on hagiographical tradition (the Greek Acts and the Confession of Cyprian) that cannot be verified by independent historical record. It is presented here as the Church’s received tradition, venerated in her liturgy, and not as documented history. Their martyrdom under Diocletian and the details of Cyprian’s conversion belong to that tradition.
Sancti Cypriáne et Justína, oráte pro nobis.