📖 Matthew Intensive — Unit 12: The Passion

Text: Matthew 27:51

The Plot and the Anointing

Matthew has brought the King through His teaching, His miracles, His entry into Jerusalem, and His final warnings. Now comes the hour for which He came. The chief priests plot to take Him by trickery and kill Him. In the middle of their scheming, a woman pours costly fragrant oil on Jesus' head at Bethany, and when the disciples call it waste, He defends her: "She has done a good work for Me... in pouring this fragrant oil on My body, she did it for My burial" (Matthew 26:10-12). He knows where this road leads. Against that beauty stands Judas, who goes to the chief priests and agrees to betray Him for thirty pieces of silver. The same event draws out both the deepest devotion and the darkest treachery.

The Last Supper

At the Passover meal Jesus tells the Twelve that one of them will betray Him, and each asks, "Lord, is it I?" Then He takes the bread, blesses and breaks it, and says, "Take, eat; this is My body." He takes the cup and says, "Drink from it, all of you. For this is My blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins" (Matthew 26:26-28). In that upper room the old Passover, which remembered the lamb whose blood spared Israel in Egypt, gives way to the new covenant in the blood of the true Lamb. The supper He gives His church is not a funeral but a remembrance and a promise, pointing back to the cross and forward to the day He will drink it new with them in His Father's kingdom.

Gethsemane

In the garden the weight of the hour falls on Him. "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death," He tells Peter, James, and John, and going a little farther He falls on His face and prays, "O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will" (Matthew 26:38-39). Three times He prays it, and three times He returns to find the disciples sleeping. "Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation," He warns them; "the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." Here we see the true cost of the cross, not first in the nails but in this submission of the King's will to the Father's. The cup He shrinks from He nevertheless takes, freely, for us.

Betrayal and Arrest

While He is still speaking, Judas arrives with a crowd carrying swords and clubs, and betrays Him with a kiss. When one of His followers draws a sword and strikes, Jesus stops him: "Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52). He reminds them that He could call on more than twelve legions of angels, but then the Scriptures would not be fulfilled. He goes willingly. And in that moment the boast of the disciples collapses: "Then all the disciples forsook Him and fled" (Matthew 26:56). The King faces His trial alone.

The Trial and Peter's Denial

They lead Him to Caiaphas the high priest, where false witnesses are sought but cannot agree. At last the high priest puts Him under oath: "Tell us if You are the Christ, the Son of God!" Jesus answers, "It is as you said," and speaks of the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven. The high priest tears his clothes and cries blasphemy, and they condemn Him as deserving death, then spit on Him and strike Him. Outside in the courtyard, Peter, who had sworn he would die before denying his Lord, is questioned by a servant girl and denies Jesus three times. When the rooster crows he remembers the Lord's word, and "he went out and wept bitterly" (Matthew 26:75). The bravest disciple discovers his own weakness in the very hour his Master is condemned.

Pilate and Barabbas

In the morning they hand Jesus over to Pilate, the Roman governor. Judas, seized with remorse, throws down the silver and hangs himself. Pilate asks, "Are You the King of the Jews?" and finds no fault in Him, yet fears the crowd. Following a custom of releasing a prisoner at the feast, he offers them a choice between Jesus and a notorious criminal named Barabbas, certain they will choose Jesus. But stirred up by the chief priests, they cry for Barabbas and shout of Jesus, "Let Him be crucified!" Pilate washes his hands before the crowd, saying he is innocent of this just Person's blood, and the people answer, "His blood be on us and on our children" (Matthew 27:25). So the guilty man goes free and the innocent King is condemned in his place — a picture, at the very gate of the cross, of what the cross itself will do.

The Crucifixion

The soldiers strip Him, put a scarlet robe and a crown of thorns on Him, and mock Him, "Hail, King of the Jews!" They lead Him out to Golgotha, compelling Simon of Cyrene to carry His cross, and there they crucify Him between two robbers. Over His head they fix the charge: THIS IS JESUS THE KING OF THE JEWS. Those who pass by hurl insults, and the chief priests mock, "He saved others; Himself He cannot save" (Matthew 27:42). They speak more truly than they know: it is precisely because He will not save Himself that He is able to save others. The King reigns from a cross, wearing a crown of thorns, with a criminal's charge for a title.

The Fourth Word — Desertion

An older Good Friday sermon pauses over the most disturbing cry from the cross: "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" It rejects the idea that Calvary was a tragic miscalculation. Jesus had repeatedly spoken of His death, walked deliberately toward Jerusalem, refused escape, and gave Himself to the authorities. Nor does the sermon reduce the cry to a passing feeling of loneliness. It takes the darkness from noon until three as a sign that the drama has reached the judgment-bearing heart of the cross: the sinless Son bears the sins of others and knows the separation that sin brings. Yet the cry is also the opening of Psalm 22. The psalm begins in anguish but moves toward the ends of the earth remembering and turning to the Lord. What looks like the extinguishing of Christ is therefore not the end. The cross will be followed by resurrection. The cry of desertion takes us onto holy ground: judgment is real, the cost of redemption is terrible, and apparent defeat is already moving toward victory.

The Three Curtains Torn Down

From the sixth hour until the ninth, darkness covers all the land. Then Jesus cries out, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" — bearing in that cry a forsakenness we cannot fathom. He cries out once more and yields up His spirit. And at that moment the veil of the temple is torn in two from top to bottom, the earth quakes, and the rocks split. Notice that the veil tears from top to bottom: had it torn from the bottom up, men might have done it, but torn from the top down, it is God Himself who opens the way. Three curtains came down that day. First, the curtain of separation: the temple had been built for division, with its veil and its graded courts keeping the high priest from the priests, the priests from the men of Israel, the men from the women, and the Jews from the Gentiles — and the cross tore every barrier away, so that as Paul would say, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Christ. Second, the curtain of mediation: before the cross only the high priest could enter God's presence, and others needed a man to go between; now that middleman is removed, for there is one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, and every believer is a priest who may come directly to God. My own great-grandfather left one church to become a Baptist the day a priest told him, "I have the power to forgive sin" — for that power belongs to Christ alone. Third, the curtain of sin: it is not God who built the barrier but we ourselves, and no effort of ours could tear it down; so Christ tore it from His side, by His body and His blood, opening a new and living way (Hebrews 10:19-20), that our sins past, present, and future might be forgiven. Yet the blood must be applied; as the lamb's blood had to be put on the doorposts in Egypt, Christ must be received as Lord and Savior, or the open way profits us nothing.

The Confession and the Burial

When the centurion and those keeping watch see the earthquake and all that has happened, they are terrified and say, "Truly this was the Son of God!" (Matthew 27:54). A Roman soldier, standing at the foot of the cross, confesses what the religious leaders would not — and his words echo the confession of the disciples in the boat and of Peter at Caesarea Philippi. As evening comes, Joseph of Arimathea, a rich man and a disciple, asks Pilate for the body, wraps it in clean linen, and lays it in his own new tomb, rolling a great stone against the door. The chief priests, remembering that Jesus had spoken of rising again, persuade Pilate to set a guard and seal the stone. They mean to keep Him in; they will instead provide witnesses to the very thing they fear.

The King Who Would Not Save Himself

The Passion is the hour to which the whole Gospel has been moving. The King who came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many, now gives it. He is anointed for burial, betrayed for silver, abandoned by His friends, denied by His boldest disciple, condemned in the place of a guilty man, and crucified under the title of a King. And in His death the veil is torn from top to bottom: the way into God's presence is thrown open, the middleman removed, the curtain of sin destroyed from God's own side. He would not come down from the cross, because He had come to die; and because He would not save Himself, He is able to save all who will receive Him. The tomb is sealed and the guard is set — but the last word has not yet been spoken.

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