A reflection for Ember Friday of September — Feria Sexta Quattuor Temporum Septembris, II classis, Friday within the Seventeenth Week after the Octave of Pentecost (25 September)
Lætétur cor quæréntium Dóminum: quærite Dóminum, et confirmámini: quærite fáciem ejus semper. “Let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord: seek ye the Lord, and be strengthened: seek his face evermore.” — Introit, Ps. 104:3-4
I. Liturgical Context
The Church keeps today the second of the three Ember Days of September, the autumn quarter of the Quattuor Tempora. The vestments are violet, the Gloria is omitted, the Preface is the Common, the Preces are said at the Little Hours, and the day is one of fast and abstinence. The station is at the Basilica of the Twelve Apostles.
Two things ought to be held together when this Mass is read.
The first is that the September Embertide is the Christian transposition of the seventh month of the Old Law. The lessons of this week are drawn from the fast of the seventh month, the Day of Atonement, and the ingathering of the harvest; Ember Wednesday reads the assembly of Esdras and the command to eat the fat and drink the sweet because the day is holy, and Ember Saturday will read the prescriptions of Leviticus 23 for the seventh month. September Embertide is therefore the Church’s Yom Kippur, kept not in figure but in the reality of the one Victim already offered. St. Leo the Great preached on this fast nearly every year of his pontificate, and the burden of those sermons is constant: the fast of the seventh month is not complete in abstinence, but is perfected in mercy and in almsgiving; what the body subtracts from itself, the hand must lay upon the poor.
The second is that this is the Church’s ordination week. Tomorrow, in the Ember Saturday Mass of twelve lessons, men are made deacons and priests. Read against that, today’s Gospel is not sentimental but jurisdictional. The scandalized guests at Simon’s table ask, Quis est hic, qui étiam peccáta dimíttit? — “Who is this that forgiveth sins also?” It is the right question. And the Church, having asked it on Friday, on Saturday lays hands upon men and gives them the answer to carry into the confessional for the rest of their lives.
Between those two facts stand the readings: a prophet commanding a nation to return, and a woman who returns without being commanded.
II. The Lesson — Osee 14:2-10
The prophecy of Osee closes with the passage the Church reads today, and it is the most tender ending of any of the Twelve.
Convertere, Israel, ad Dominum Deum tuum: quoniam corruisti in iniquitate tua. Tollite vobiscum verba, et convertimini ad Dominum. “Return, O Israel, to the Lord thy God: for thou hast fallen down by thy iniquity. Take with you words, and return to the Lord.”
Take with you words. St. Jerome, whose commentary on Osee is the Latin Church’s standing treatment of this book, presses the strangeness of the command. God does not say: take with you bulls from the herd, take rams, take the fat of lambs. He asks for verba — for speech, that is, for confession. What the sinner owes is an account of himself, and he owes it in his own voice. The phrase that follows carries the same sense: reddemus vitulos labiorum nostrorum, “we will render the calves of our lips.” Jerome notes the divergence of the Greek, which reads the fruit of our lips rather than the calves, and the Apostle follows that reading when he bids us offer God continually a sacrifice of praise, the fruit of lips confessing His name (Heb. 13:15). Either way the doctrine is one: the sacrifice now required of Israel is drawn out of the mouth of the penitent.
Then the prophet specifies what returning means by naming what must be renounced. Assur non salvabit nos, super equum non ascendemus, nec dicemus ultra: Dii nostri opera manuum nostrarum. Three securities, and they are the three that every soul builds. Assur is the foreign alliance — the arrangement, the patron, the hedge against ruin that is contracted with something other than God. The horse is native strength, the cavalry, what a man can do because he is capable. And the works of our hands are the idols proper, the things we have made and then consented to serve. The Fathers who treat this text, Jerome in the West and St. Cyril of Alexandria in the East, read the list not as three sins among many but as the anatomy of one sin: the displacement of trust.
What follows is the hinge of the entire Lesson, and it must not be hurried:
Sanabo contritiones eorum, diligam eos spontanee: quia aversus est furor meus ab eis. “I will heal their breaches, I will love them freely: for my wrath is turned away from them.”
Diligam eos spontanee. Freely, of My own motion, unpurchased. Israel has not yet returned — the return is still in the imperative mood two verses earlier — and God has already announced that His love is gratuitous and His wrath already turned. The healing is not the wage of the conversion. It is the cause of it.
The remainder of the passage is an outpouring of fertility and fragrance, and it should be read slowly, because the Gospel will pick up its vocabulary. Ero quasi ros — I will be as the dew. Not as the storm, not as the flood: as the dew, which falls in silence, at night, without being felt, and without which nothing in a dry country lives. The Fathers see in the dew the ordinary manner of grace, and the liturgy has long since made the image its own in Rorate cæli desuper. And where the dew falls, everything begins to smell of something: the lily, the roots of Libanus, the olive, the vine, the wine. Odor eius ut Libani. A soul that has consented to be watered secretly becomes perceptible to others, and what it gives off is not itself.
The Lesson ends with a warning that the Church never omits: Quis sapiens, et intelliget ista? … quia rectæ viæ Domini, et justi ambulabunt in eis: prævaricatores vero corruent in eis. The ways of the Lord are right, and the just walk in them, and the transgressors fall in them. Note the construction: it is the same road. The road is not altered by the man who falls on it. St. Augustine states the principle in its most memorable form when he observes that one and the same fire makes gold shine and chaff smoke, and under one and the same flail the straw is beaten to pieces and the grain is purified (De civitate Dei I.8). Mercy offered is not neutral. It saves the one who receives it and hardens the one who refuses, and today’s Gospel puts both men at the same dinner table.
III. The Gospel — Luke 7:36-50
A Pharisee named Simon invites Our Lord to dinner. A woman known in the city as a sinner comes in behind Him, stands at His feet weeping, washes them with her tears, wipes them with her hair, kisses them, and anoints them from an alabaster box. Simon says nothing aloud. He says it intra se: if this man were a prophet, he would know what kind of woman is touching him.
Our Lord answers the thought rather than the words, which is itself the first sermon in the passage. Then He tells the shortest parable in the Gospels. Two debtors, five hundred pence and fifty, and one crucial clause: non habentibus illis unde redderent, donavit utrisque — “whereas they had not wherewith to pay, he forgave them both.”
Hold that line beside Osee’s diligam eos spontanee. They are the same doctrine in two idioms. The creditor did not forgive because the debtors produced something; he forgave because they could not. The prophet says God will love freely; the parable says the remission preceded the love, and the love is what remission produces in a man who notices it. This governs the difficult sentence that follows — Remittuntur ei peccata multa, quoniam dilexit multum, “many sins are forgiven her, because she hath loved much” — which has been mishandled in both directions. The parable Our Lord Himself supplies forbids us to read the quoniam as a purchase price, as though her love had bought the pardon; the creditor in the story forgave first. And the closing half of the verse forbids us to read her love as irrelevant: cui autem minus dimittitur, minus diligit. The love is the evidence by which the forgiveness is read, and it is itself a gift. St. Thomas treats the order of these motions in his question on the justification of the ungodly (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 113): the infusion of grace, the movement of free will toward God, the movement of detestation of sin, and the remission of guilt are simultaneous in time, though ordered in nature. The Council of Trent teaches the same in its decree on justification (Sess. VI, cc. 5-7): the dispositions are real, and the whole of them is of prevenient grace.
The Fathers, attending to the scene rather than the schema, say something the schema cannot say.
St. Gregory the Great preached the great Western homily on this passage (Homilia 33 in Evangelia), and his reading has never been improved upon. He looks at what the woman brought and observes that she brought nothing new. The ointment had perfumed her flesh; she now pours it on the feet of God. The eyes that had coveted now spend themselves in tears. The hair that she had arranged to draw the glance of men now dries the feet of Christ. The mouth that had served her sin now cannot stop kissing His feet. Gregory’s formulation is that she turned the whole mass of her offences into virtues, so that as many things as she had in herself for delight, so many she found in herself to make a holocaust of. This is the most practical sentence in the patristic literature on penance: conversion does not require a different self, but the reversal of the same faculties.
St. Ambrose, in his exposition of St. Luke (Book VI), reads the house of Simon as a figure. Two guests are present at the same meal, and grace goes to the one who has nothing. The Pharisee, who has the law, the standing, the house and the invitation, gives no water for the feet, no kiss, no oil for the head — the ordinary courtesies — because a man persuaded of his solvency offers nothing. Ambrose sees in the Pharisee the synagogue and in the weeping woman the Church gathered from the nations, coming in late, uninvited, and behind. Ambrose is also, characteristically, careful about the woman’s identity, and does not insist on the conflation that later Latin usage took for granted.
St. Augustine, treating this Gospel (Sermo 99), fixes on Simon’s interior verdict. The Pharisee’s error is not that he judged the woman correctly — she was in fact a sinner — but that he did not know the physician when he saw Him. A doctor at the bedside of a diseased man is not compromised by the disease. Augustine also draws out the irony of the concession Simon makes: asked which debtor loves more, Simon answers correctly and pronounces his own sentence, as David did before Nathan. He is condemned out of his own reasoning, gently, and given the chance to see it.
And there is one detail the Fathers notice that the modern reader passes over: the woman never speaks. In a passage where the Pharisee speaks, the guests speak, and Our Lord speaks at length, the one person who has come to be reconciled says not a single word from beginning to end. Osee had said tollite vobiscum verba — take with you words. She takes an alabaster box and her hair and her tears, and she brings no words at all.
She does not need to. Christ speaks them for her. Every word of her confession is uttered by the Word Himself, turned toward her accuser: vides hanc mulierem? — do you see this woman? He recites what she has done, item by item, as a defence, and then He says the two sentences that are the whole of the sacrament: Remittuntur tibi peccata and Fides tua te salvam fecit: vade in pace.
IV. Synthesis: Exitus and Reditus
The Thomistic structure of the Mass is unusually transparent today.
The exitus is the departure catalogued in the Lesson: Assur, the horse, the works of our hands — trust relocated from God to an alliance, a capacity, an artefact. The woman of the city is the same departure in the flesh rather than in the politics of a kingdom. Osee’s Israel and Simon’s uninvited guest have committed the identical sin in different registers, and the Lesson insists on the word corruisti, thou hast fallen down: the sinner is not merely misdirected but collapsed.
The reditus begins, in both readings, at the wrong end. Osee’s God announces His gratuitous love before Israel has moved, and falls as dew before anything grows. The creditor in the parable cancels the debt of men who have nothing, and the love follows the cancellation. The woman enters the house already forgiven in the divine intention, and her tears are not the payment but the first symptom of health. This is why the Church gives us these two texts on a fast day: to forestall exactly the error a fast invites, which is to suppose that the ashes purchase the mercy.
And the two readings interlock at the point of the sacrifice. Osee asks for the vituli labiorum, the calves of our lips — the offering that the mouth makes when it stops defending itself. The woman offers her whole body in that key: the eyes, the hair, the mouth, the ointment. And the Mass in which both are read will proceed, within the hour, to the one Sacrifice of which the calves of our lips are the echo, the Victim who is both the Priest at Simon’s table and the offering on the altar. The Offertory chant of this Mass is Benedic, anima mea, Domino… et renovabitur sicut aquilæ juventus tua: bless the Lord, O my soul, and thy youth shall be renewed like the eagle’s. That is Osee’s dew and Gregory’s reversed faculties, sung over the bread.
The fragrance is the sign that the circuit has closed. Osee: odor eius ut Libani. The Gospel: a house filled with the smell of an ointment that had been bought for another purpose. The Apostle: we are the good odour of Christ unto God (2 Cor. 2:15). A soul genuinely returned does not announce itself. It is detected.
V. Devotional Application
Ember Friday asks for three things, and they correspond exactly to the three parts of penance that the woman performs in silence.
Contrition — the tears. Make the examination concrete today. Not “I am a sinner,” which costs nothing, but Osee’s three questions put to your own life. What is my Assur? — the arrangement, the relationship, the reserve of money or influence that I am quietly relying on to keep me safe, and that I would defend before I would defend prayer. What is my horse? — the competence I trust, the thing I am good at, the ability that has bailed me out before and that I expect to bail me out again. What are the works of my hands? — the thing I made, that I now serve. Name one of each. That is the fast of the seventh month.
Confession — the approach. The woman crossed a room full of men who knew exactly what she was. Whatever you found in the examination belongs in the confessional, and the Ember season is the classical time to go. Note that Our Lord did not spare her the public walk to His feet and did not spare her the Pharisee’s stare; He simply stood between her and it once she arrived. The priest who will hear you was ordained in a week like this one, to say the sentence Christ says at the end of this Gospel.
Satisfaction — the ointment. St. Leo’s rule for the September fast is that abstinence without mercy is a diet. Whatever the fast saves today, give away today, and give it where it cannot be repaid. And take Gregory’s principle into the week: do not look for a new set of faculties, but reverse the ones you have. The tongue that gossips is the tongue that can catechize. The attention that is squandered is the attention that can be given to a person who bores you. The same fire, the same flail.
One more, for those who are Simon rather than the woman, and most of us are Simon most of the time: notice the courtesies he omitted. Water, a kiss, oil — nothing grand, only the ordinary hospitality anyone would have offered. He did not insult Christ; he simply did not trouble himself. Coldness of that kind rarely feels like sin. It is why the Gospel puts him at the same table as an adulteress and lets us watch which of the two goes home justified.
VI. The Collect
Præsta, quæsumus, omnipotens Deus: ut, observationes sacras annua devotione recolentes, et corpore tibi placeamus et mente. Per Dominum.
“Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that we, keeping these sacred observances with yearly devotion, may be pleasing unto Thee both in body and in mind. Through our Lord.”
The Collect asks for the integration that the whole Mass is about. Et corpore et mente — the body and the mind together. Simon’s mind was orthodox and his body offered nothing, not even water. The woman’s body did everything and her mouth said nothing. The Church asks that the fast of the body and the conversion of the mind be one act, which is precisely what the Ember Days exist to train.
The Secret asks that the gifts of our fasting be accepted, that they may both make us worthy by expiation and bring us to the eternal promises; and the Postcommunion, that giving thanks for what we have received, we may receive still greater benefits. The movement across the three orations is the reditus in miniature: an offering made, an expiation applied, a greater gift asked for on the strength of the first.
VII. Aspiration
Remítte mihi peccáta mea, Dómine, et dilígam te multum. “Forgive me my sins, O Lord, and I shall love Thee much.”
Or the Communion antiphon of the day, said slowly in the pew: Aufer a me opprobrium et contemptum, quia mandata tua exquisivi, Domine — “Take away from me reproach and contempt, for I have sought out Thy commandments, O Lord” (Ps. 118:22).
Devotion: the Sorrowful Mysteries, with attention to the Scourging; or, if you keep the Ember fast with the Miserere, Psalm 50 said once at each of the three hours you would ordinarily have eaten.
VIII. For Further Study
Today opens onto three of our paths.
The Sacred Liturgy path takes up the Quattuor Tempora themselves: their derivation from the Roman agricultural feriæ and the seventh-month fast of Leviticus, their fixation by St. Leo and St. Gregory, their role as the Church’s ordination weeks, and their suppression from the universal calendar in 1969.
The Theology and Doctrine path treats the question this Gospel raises and cannot settle by itself: the order of justification — prevenient grace, the dispositions of faith and charity, contrition and attrition, and how quoniam dilexit multum is to be construed against the parable that precedes it. Trent Session VI and Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 113 are the two texts to read side by side.
The Lives of the Saints path, and with it our standing East-West comparative track, takes up the identity of this woman. The Latin West, following St. Gregory’s homilies, came to read the sinner of Luke 7, Mary of Bethany, and Mary Magdalen as one person, and built a cult, a feast, and a vast iconography on the identification. The Greek Fathers, St. John Chrysostom among them, generally kept the women distinct, and the Byzantine rite commemorates the sinful woman on her own in the Holy Wednesday office, in the hymn of Kassiani. The divergence is instructive about how liturgy forms exegesis as much as exegesis forms liturgy.
IX. Source Transparency
Scripture is quoted in the Douay-Rheims with the Clementine Vulgate inline. The Mass propers are those of Feria Sexta Quattuor Temporum Septembris in the 1962 Missale Romanum.
Patristic material is presented as faithful paraphrase with the place indicated, not as direct quotation: St. Jerome, Commentarii in Osee III (on 14:2-10); St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentarius in xii prophetas minores, on Osee; St. Augustine, De civitate Dei I.8, and Sermo 99; St. Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam VI; St. Gregory the Great, Homilia 33 in Evangelia; St. Leo the Great, sermons de ieiunio septimi mensis. St. Thomas is cited to the question. Conciliar material is cited to the chapter of Trent Session VI.
Quis est hic, qui étiam peccáta dimíttit?