A reflection for Ember Wednesday of September — Feria Quarta Quatuor Temporum Septembris, II classis (23 September), with commemoration of S. Lini Papae et Martyris
The Mass of this day opens not with a sigh of penance but with a trumpet: Exsultáte Deo, adiutóri nostro… cánite in inítio mensis tuba — “Rejoice to God our helper… blow up the trumpet on the new moon, for it is a commandment in Israel” (Ps. 80:2-4). The priest is vested in violet. The faithful kneel at Flectámus génua. The Church is fasting. And she begins by blowing a horn.
That contradiction is not an accident of compilation; it is the whole argument of the day. September was the seventh month of the old Roman reckoning, as it was of Israel’s sacred calendar, and the seventh month held both the Day of Atonement and the Feast of Tabernacles — a fast and a harvest festival within a fortnight of each other. The Church took up that rhythm, kept the Ember Days of the seventh month as days of fast and partial abstinence, and gave the Mass two lessons instead of one. The medieval commentators on the liturgy explain the doubled lesson as a provision for the ordinands, who on the Saturday of this week will be presented for Holy Orders and who must be instructed in the two laws. So the Church reads to her future priests, on a day when no one has eaten, a prophecy of unmanageable abundance, a scene of public weeping that ends in a command to feast, and a Gospel about a devil that will not come out.
I. The plowman shall overtake the reaper
The first lesson (Amos 9:13-15) is the last paragraph of a book that is otherwise almost unrelieved threat. Amos has spent eight chapters on the plumb line and the basket of summer fruit and the famine of hearing the word of God. Then, at the end, the ruin is reversed in a single sentence of excess:
“Behold the days come, saith the Lord, and the ploughman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed: and the mountains shall drop sweetness, and every hill shall be tilled.”
What is promised is not a good year. It is the abolition of the interval. In the ordinary course, the sower waits on the reaper and the reaper on the vintager, and between each there is a long stretch of nothing but patience. Here the seasons collide: the plow is in the furrow before the last sheaf is carried, and the man treading the winepress meets the man going out to sow.
We are not free to read this merely as a figure of speech, because the Apostles have already told us how to read this chapter. At the Council of Jerusalem, St. James settles the question of the Gentiles by quoting the verses immediately preceding these — the rebuilding of the fallen tabernacle of David, “that the residue of men may seek after the Lord” (Acts 15:16-17, citing Amos 9:11-12). The Holy Ghost, speaking through the first council of the Church, identifies the harvest of Amos with the calling of the nations. St. Jerome, in his commentary on the prophet, follows that lead and refers the promise to the time of the Gospel, when the seed of preaching and the harvest of souls are no longer separated by generations; St. Cyril of Alexandria reads the restored vineyards and rebuilt cities of the closing verses as the Church gathered out of the Gentiles, planted by Christ where the old ruin stood.
And then the guarantee: Et plantábo eos super humum suam: et non evéllam eos ultra de terra sua — “And I will plant them upon their own land: and I will no more pluck them out of their land which I have given them.” This is why the Church puts the passage on a fast day. The Ember fast is not an anxious attempt to secure a harvest from a God who might refuse. It is the prayer of a people who have already been told that the planting is permanent.
II. From the morning until midday
The second lesson (2 Esd. 8:1-10) moves from prophecy to a scene, and the scene is a liturgy. The exiles have come home to a broken city. They gather “as one man” in the street before the water gate and ask Esdras to bring out the book of the law. He reads it from the morning until midday. He stands on a step of wood which he had made to speak upon. When he opens the book, all the people stand; when he blesses God, they answer Amen, amen with lifted hands and then bow to the ground; the Levites keep silence among the people; and the law is read “distinctly and plainly to be understood: and they understood when it was read.”
Every gesture there survives in the Roman Rite. The people stand for the reading of the word. They answer the blessing. They kneel. The ministers keep order and silence. The text is proclaimed from a raised place and then explained. St. Bede — whose exposition of Esdras and Nehemias is the one sustained patristic commentary we possess on these books — reads the details as deliberately figurative: the water gate is the gate of the Scriptures, through which the water of saving doctrine enters the city; the wooden step on which the scribe is lifted above the people is the pulpit of the preacher, and behind the pulpit, the wood of the Cross, from which alone the law is rightly expounded. Esdras raised on timber to open the book is a small, precise anticipation of Christ raised on timber to open the meaning of everything written.
Then the reaction, and the correction of the reaction. The people weep. Hearing the law after long exile, they see at once how far they have fallen from it, and the assembly dissolves into mourning. And Nehemias and Esdras and the Levites tell them to stop: “This is a holy day to the Lord our God: do not mourn, nor weep… Go, eat fat meats, and drink sweet wine, and send portions to them that have not prepared for themselves… for the joy of the Lord is our strength.”
St. Gregory the Great distinguishes two compunctions: the compunction of fear, by which the soul is pierced with dread of its own sins, and the compunction of love, by which it is pierced with longing for God. The first is necessary and is not the place to stay. The tears at the water gate were of the first kind, and they were interrupted — not because sorrow for sin is wrong, but because a soul that weeps and does not then eat has mistaken the means for the end.
Notice what the Church does with this text. She takes verse ten — Comédite pínguia et bíbite mulsum — and makes it the Communion antiphon of a fast day. At the moment when the faithful have eaten nothing since rising, the choir sings eat fat meats and drink sweet wine, and what is placed on the tongue is the Body of Christ. The fast is not contradicted; it is explained. It was always ordered to a meal. And the antiphon keeps the clause that makes the feast honest: send portions to them that have not prepared for themselves. St. Leo the Great, in the series of sermons he preached year after year on this very fast of the seventh month, will not let his people separate the two: what is subtracted from the table is to appear in the hands of the poor, or the abstinence is merely a diet.
III. If thou canst believe
The Gospel (Mark 9:16-28) is the one text in the Missal that states outright why this day exists.
A man brings his son out of the crowd. The boy has a dumb spirit which throws him down, and he foams and gnashes his teeth and wastes away; it has done this “from his infancy,” and has cast him into fire and into water to destroy him. The father has already tried the Apostles: “I spoke to thy disciples to cast him out, and they could not.”
Our Lord’s first word is a reproach — O generátio incrédula — and St. John Chrysostom, commenting on the parallel in St. Matthew, insists that it is not aimed at the disciples alone. The Lord turns it upon the father and the bystanders, whose want of faith had as much to do with the failure as the weakness of the Twelve; and He proves it immediately by throwing the condition back on the man: “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.”
The father’s answer is one of the great sentences of the Gospels, and it is a sentence only a desperate man would think to say: Credo, Dómine: ádiuva incredulitátem meam. “I do believe, Lord: help my unbelief.” He does not claim a faith he lacks, and he does not walk away for lack of it. He offers what he has and asks for the rest — which is to say, he asks God for faith itself. St. Augustine returns to this verse against those who held that the beginning of faith is man’s own contribution to his salvation, to which grace is afterwards added. The man at the foot of the mountain has settled the question. Even the fragment of belief he brings, he must beg to have completed.
The healing itself is described in two verbs that the Mass has already sung. The boy is elísus in terram — dashed to the ground, rolling and foaming. Then “Jesus taking him by the hand, lifted him up, and he arose.” An hour earlier, between the two lessons, the choir sang the Gradual from Psalm 112: Súscitans a terra ínopem, et de stércore érigens páuperem — “raising up the needy from the earth, and lifting up the poor out of the dunghill.” The Gradual is the prophecy and the Gospel is the photograph. This is what the God who dwells on high and beholds the low things does with His hands.
And then, privately, in the house, the disciples ask the question that every priest and every Christian eventually asks: Quare nos non potúimus eiícere eum? Why could we not? The answer is the Church’s reason for the day: “This kind can go out by nothing, but by prayer and fasting.”
St. Peter Chrysologus put the doctrine in a line: fasting is the soul of prayer, and mercy is the lifeblood of fasting; let no man try to divide them. The second Collect of this Mass asks for exactly the union the Gospel requires — ut, dum a cibis corporálibus se ábstinet, a vítiis quoque mente ieiúnet: that while the household of God abstains from bodily food, it may fast in mind from vice as well. A fast that leaves the vices fed is not the thing Our Lord was talking about.
IV. Why these three are one Mass
Set the lessons side by side and the logic is plain.
Amos promises a harvest so great that the seasons overrun each other. Esdras shows the harvest being received: a ruined people, home again, standing in the street to hear the law, weeping, and then commanded to eat and to share. And the Gospel names the price and the instrument: there is a strength in the world that the Church’s own ministers cannot break by good intentions or by office alone, and it yields to prayer and fasting.
This is why the Ember Days fall where they do. The Church, having gathered the fruits of the earth, does not simply give thanks; she fasts, and on the Saturday of this week she lays hands on men. The Gospel she chose for the Wednesday is the story of disciples who could not cast out a devil, read three days before she makes new disciples who will be asked to. There is no flattery in that choice. It tells the ordinand, before he ever puts on a stole, that the power he is about to receive will be inert in him unless he prays and goes hungry.
And the commemoration of the day quietly makes the same point. St. Linus, whom St. Paul names in his last letter from Rome (2 Tim. 4:21) and whom the Church remembers as the first to receive the See of Peter after the Apostle’s death, is not kept today with a Mass of his own; he is commemorated inside the Ember fast. The first successor stands in the middle of the week of ordinations, and the Church prays for her clergy over his name.
V. A word for practice
Keep the fast, if you can. The traditional discipline of Ember Wednesday is a fast with partial abstinence. The current law of the Latin Church no longer binds the faithful to it, and no one should imagine himself under an obligation he does not have; but the day remains in the calendar, and what is no longer commanded may still be chosen. If health or state of life forbids the full observance, take some real subtraction — one meal, the thing you would most have liked — and mean it as an offering for priests.
Send portions. The Communion antiphon does not let the fast stay private. Whatever the day’s abstinence saves, give it away this week, and give it to someone who has not prepared for himself.
Pray by name for a priest, and for the men being ordained. This is the Church’s own intention for these three days. She is not chiefly asking for good weather.
Make the father’s prayer your own. Take the one place where your faith is thin — the prayer you have stopped expecting to be answered, the person you have privately written off, the sin you assume will always own you — and say over it, slowly: Credo, Dómine: ádiuva incredulitátem meam. It is not a confession of failure. It is the only prayer in the Gospel that God answered before it was finished.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the day — Misericórdiæ tuæ remédiis, quǽsumus, Dómine, fragílitas nostra subsístat: ut, quæ sua conditióne attéritur, tua cleméntia reparétur. “May our frailty, we beseech Thee, O Lord, be sustained by the remedies of Thy mercy: that what is worn away by its own condition may be repaired by Thy clemency.”
Suggested devotion: the Sorrowful Mysteries, with attention to the Agony in the Garden — where the Lord who told His disciples that this kind goes out by prayer and fasting spent a night doing both, and told them to watch with Him and could not keep them awake.
If you wish to go deeper, this day opens onto two of our paths. The Sacred Liturgy path takes up the structure of the liturgical year and the Ember Days in particular — why the Church keeps four fasts at the hinges of the seasons, and why she ordains on their Saturdays. The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path treats fasting and penance directly: what the Fathers taught about its measure, its dangers, and its inseparable companion, almsgiving.
Sancte Line, ora pro nobis.
Gáudium Dómini est fortitúdo nostra.