Faithfullee

Anointing, Supper, and Betrayal

The passion sequence opens at Bethany, where an unnamed woman pours expensive ointment over Jesus's head. The disciples object to the waste, but Jesus defends her: "She has done a beautiful thing to me... she has anointed my body beforehand for burial" (26:10, 12). R. T. France notes the tragic irony that this woman, whose name Matthew does not record, understands what the Twelve have not yet grasped: that the way of the Christos runs through death (The Gospel of Matthew, NICNT, 2007). She is the one who gets it. Not the disciples. An unnamed woman with a jar of perfume.

That same night, in an upper room, Jesus gathers his disciples for Passover. He takes bread, blesses it, breaks it. He takes the cup. The words he speaks over the cup introduce a critical Greek term: diathēkē (διαθήκη) — covenant. "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins" (26:28). D. A. Carson argues that the phrase deliberately echoes Exodus 24:8, where Moses sprinkled blood on the people at Sinai, sealing the covenant between God and Israel. Jesus is inaugurating a new covenant, and its seal is not animal blood but his own (Matthew, EBC, 1984). The Passover meal — Israel's memorial of redemption from Egypt — becomes the meal of a greater redemption. Jesus takes the most sacred meal in Israel's calendar and rewrites what it means.

"This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins." — Matthew 26:28 (ESV)

And then Judas leaves to meet with the chief priests. Matthew has already told us this happened (26:14–16) — Judas agreed to hand Jesus over for thirty pieces of silver. The betrayal is in motion before the meal even begins.

Gethsemane: Three Times

From the upper room, Jesus leads the disciples to Gethsemane. He takes Peter, James, and John deeper in, and then goes further still — alone — to pray. What follows is one of the most human passages in any of the Gospels. Jesus says: "My soul is very sorrowful, even to death" (26:38). He falls on his face. He prays: "My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will" (26:39).

The cup is not a metaphor for suffering in general. It is the Old Testament image of the cup of divine wrath — the concentrated judgment of God against sin, which the prophets described in terrifying terms (Isaiah 51:17, Jeremiah 25:15). Craig Keener observes that Jesus's prayer is not the prayer of one who does not understand what is coming, but of one who understands perfectly and chooses it anyway (The Gospel of Matthew, Eerdmans, 1999). The weight Jesus is recoiling from is not physical pain but the full judgment of God against sin.

He returns to find the disciples asleep. He wakes them: "Could you not watch with me one hour?" He goes and prays a second time — the same prayer. He returns and finds them asleep again. He goes a third time. Matthew is specific about the number: three. Three times Jesus prays this. Three times the disciples fail to stay awake with him. The number three will echo again before morning.

He returns after the third prayer and says: "Sleep and take your rest later on. See, the hour is at hand." Judas arrives with a crowd carrying swords and clubs. The kiss of greeting becomes the sign of betrayal. Jesus is seized. Peter cuts off the ear of the high priest's servant; Jesus rebukes him: "Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (26:52). The disciples all flee. Matthew notes it in a characteristic phrase: "But all this has taken place that the Scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled" (26:56).

Trial, Denial, Judas, and Pilate

Jesus is taken first to Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, where witnesses give contradictory testimony. Finally the high priest demands a direct answer: "Are you the Christ, the Son of God?" (26:63). Jesus answers with a fusion of Daniel 7 and Psalm 110: the Son of Man will be seen seated at the right hand of Power, coming on the clouds of heaven. The high priest tears his robes. The charge: blasphemy. The verdict: death.

While Jesus stands before Caiaphas, Peter stands in the courtyard below. Three times he is asked if he was with Jesus. Three times he denies it — first to a servant girl, then to another servant girl, then to the bystanders who recognize his Galilean accent. The third denial comes with oaths and curses. When the rooster crows, Peter remembers what Jesus had told him: "Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times." He goes out and weeps bitterly. France notes the devastating parallel: at the moment Jesus confesses his identity before the highest court in Israel, his leading disciple denies knowing him to a servant girl (The Gospel of Matthew, NICNT, 2007). The symmetry is brutal.

Then comes a detail that gets passed over quickly in most retellings: Judas. When Judas sees that Jesus has been condemned, he changes his mind. He goes back to the chief priests and elders and tries to return the thirty pieces of silver: "I have sinned by betraying innocent blood." Their answer is chilling in its indifference: "What is that to us? See to it yourself." They don't care. Judas throws the silver into the temple and goes out and hangs himself. The chief priests pick up the coins — but they can't put them in the treasury, because it's blood money. So they buy a potter's field. Matthew notes that this fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah (though the quotation is closer to Zechariah 11:12–13 — a textual complexity scholars have written about at length). Two men are destroyed by this night: one publicly, one quietly. Judas's end is almost always skimmed past in sermons. Matthew doesn't skim it.

Before Pilate, Jesus is mostly silent. Pilate is clearly uneasy. Then something unusual happens: his wife sends him a message during the trial — she has had a dream about Jesus and warns Pilate to have nothing to do with "that righteous man." This is the only appearance of Pilate's wife in any of the Gospels, and it arrives at the most critical moment. Dreams, in Matthew's Gospel, have carried divine messages since chapter 1. Pilate ignores her.

The crowd demands Barabbas. Pilate, wanting to satisfy the crowd rather than his conscience, asks what they want done with Jesus. The crowd shouts: "Let him be crucified." Pilate washes his hands before the crowd: "I am innocent of this man's blood." The crowd's response is one of the most haunting lines in the Gospel: "His blood be on us and on our children!" (27:25). Matthew records it without commentary. Generations of readers have wrestled with what it means and how it has been misused. What it meant to the crowd in that moment was a declaration of confidence — they were certain they were in the right. The weight of what they were saying, none of them understood.

Jesus is flogged and handed over to be crucified.

The Cross: What Matthew Does Not Skip

At Golgotha, two robbers are crucified with Jesus, one on each side. Matthew says both criminals reviled him (27:44) — both of them, not just one. This is in contrast to Luke's account, where one of the criminals rebukes the other and asks Jesus to remember him. In Matthew, both join the mocking. The passers-by mock him. The chief priests, scribes, and elders mock him. The soldiers mock him. Everyone mocks him. Matthew does not soften it.

At the ninth hour — three in the afternoon — Jesus cries out in Aramaic: "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (27:46). Matthew gives both the Aramaic and the Greek translation, as though unwilling to let the reader look away. Some bystanders mishear it as a call for Elijah. Someone runs and offers him a sponge of sour wine. They wait to see if Elijah will come. He doesn't.

Carson argues that this cry is not a cry of despair but of desolation accepted in faith — because these are the opening words of Psalm 22, a psalm that begins in abandonment and ends in vindication, a psalm that was waiting for this moment (Matthew, EBC, 1984). Jesus isn't losing faith. He is going into the furthest possible depth of what it means to be forsaken — carrying the full weight of divine abandonment on behalf of everyone who has ever felt that God was absent. He goes into the darkness so that the darkness is not the last word for any of us.

"Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" that is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" — Matthew 27:46 (ESV)

Jesus cries out again and breathes his last. At that moment, three things happen simultaneously: the curtain of the temple is torn in two from top to bottom, the earth shakes, and rocks split. A Roman centurion, watching, says: "Truly this was the Son of God!" (27:54). The one who condemned Jesus as a blasphemer for making this claim is now confessed by a Gentile soldier at the foot of the cross. Keener notes this as another of Matthew's foreshadowings of the worldwide mission to come (The Gospel of Matthew, Eerdmans, 1999).

And then there is a detail in Matthew 27:52–53 that almost nobody preaches on, that we had somehow never noticed until we read this passage slowly: the tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many. Matthew records this plainly, without extended explanation. Dead people were raised. They walked into Jerusalem. People saw them. It is one of the strangest and most unnerving verses in the New Testament, and it is almost always passed over in silence. Matthew doesn't explain it. He just states it as one of the things that happened when Jesus died. Whatever it means, it fits Matthew's pattern: the death of Jesus is a cosmic, not merely personal, event. The age to come is breaking into the present age.

The women are watching from a distance: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee. They watched the crucifixion. They watched where he was laid.

Joseph of Arimathea, a rich man and a disciple of Jesus, goes to Pilate and asks for the body. Pilate grants it. Joseph wraps the body in clean linen and lays it in his own new tomb, cut in the rock, and rolls a great stone to the door. The women sit across from the tomb. The chief priests and Pharisees go to Pilate: they remember that Jesus said he would rise after three days, and they want guards posted so the disciples cannot steal the body and claim he rose. Pilate tells them to make it as secure as they can. They seal the stone and post a guard.

Resurrection and the Great Commission

On the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary come to see the tomb. There is a great earthquake. An angel of the Lord descends, rolls back the stone — not to let Jesus out, but to show that he is gone — and sits on it. His appearance is like lightning. The guards shake with fear and become like dead men. The angel speaks to the women: "Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said" (28:5–6). Go and tell the disciples.

The women depart with fear and great joy — Matthew holds both together. On the way, Jesus himself meets them. They take hold of his feet and worship him. He tells them the same thing: go and tell the brothers to go to Galilee, and they will see him there.

Meanwhile, some of the guards report to the chief priests what happened. The chief priests and elders hold a meeting. They give the soldiers a large sum of money and tell them to say the disciples came at night and stole the body while they slept. If the governor hears about it, they will satisfy him and keep the soldiers out of trouble. The soldiers take the money and do as they are told. Matthew adds: "And this story has been spread among the Jews to this day" (28:15). He is acknowledging the counter-narrative that was already circulating even as he wrote.

The eleven disciples go to Galilee, to the mountain Jesus had appointed. When they see him, they worship him. Matthew adds with characteristic honesty: "but some doubted" (28:17). Not all. Some. Even here, at the appearance of the risen Jesus on a mountain in Galilee, some of the eleven are not sure. Matthew does not hide this. He records it plainly, and then moves immediately to what Jesus says — because the commission Jesus gives does not wait for unanimous certainty. It goes out into the middle of worship and doubt at the same time.

Then Jesus speaks the final words of the Gospel:

"And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age." — Matthew 28:20 (ESV)

He begins with exousia (ἐξουσία) — authority: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me" (28:18). This is the Christos claim made ultimate. He then issues the commission with a single main verb: mathēteuō (μαθητεύσατε) — "make disciples." Go, baptize, teach — these are the participles that describe how disciples are made. The scope is "all nations." The content is "all that I have commanded you." And then the promise that closes the Gospel and answers its opening: "I am with you always, to the end of the age."

Matthew opened with the name Emmanuel — "God with us" (1:23). He closes with the risen Jesus making that name a permanent promise. France describes this as "the most deliberate bookend in the New Testament," the Gospel's entire theological argument compressed into a single symmetry: the one who came as God-with-us departs as the one who will be with us always (The Gospel of Matthew, NICNT, 2007).

The "some doubted" in verse 17 stays with us every time we read this passage. The disciples who doubted still received the commission. They weren't disqualified. The Great Commission was given to a group that included people who were not fully certain. We find that honest and strangely reassuring — that Jesus doesn't wait for perfect faith before he sends people out. He sends them as they are, into the work, with the promise that he is with them. Matthew ends not with triumphalism but with presence. Not "now you have it all figured out" but "I am with you always." That's what we're learning to stand on.

Last updated: March 3, 2026.