The Cup He Would Not Let Pass

Two days, and a jar of nard (26:1–16)

Matthew 26 is the longest chapter in the Gospel, and it opens with a sentence that closes a door. For the fifth and last time Matthew writes "when Jesus had finished all these words" — the formula that has closed each of the five great blocks of teaching in this Gospel, from the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5–7) to the Olivet Discourse (chapters 24–25), and that here closes them all. The teaching is over. From this verse forward the verbs move out of Jesus' hands and into other people's: he is anointed, betrayed, seized, bound, struck, led away. And the first thing he says on the far side of the last discourse is a sentence no one else in the room could have said: "You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified." He names the feast and the fate in one breath, as though they had been waiting for each other since Egypt. They had.

Matthew then sets three scenes beside each other without a word of commentary, which is one of the ways he argues. In the court of the high priest, professionals take counsel to seize Jesus "by deceit," and their only hesitation is crowd management — "not during the feast, lest a riot occur among the people." In Bethany, a woman whose name Matthew does not give breaks open an alabaster jar and pours it over his head; the disciples do the arithmetic and call it waste. And then Judas, having just watched extravagance rebuked, walks out and asks the priests what they will pay.

Underneath all three scenes runs a single verb: paradidōmi, to hand over. It is in verses 2, 15, 16, 21, 45, 46, and 48, and English keeps changing clothes for it — delivered up, betray, hand over. That is not a translator's embarrassment; it is Matthew's point. The same act is treachery when Judas performs it and gift when the Father performs it, and both sentences are true of the same night.

The woman's gift is priced by the disciples and read by Jesus. D. A. Carson — a Canadian New Testament scholar whose commentary on Matthew is the modern voice we lean on most through this Gospel — puts the exchange in one line: "What they call waste, Jesus calls “a beautiful thing.”" And "you always have the poor with you" is not a shrug at poverty. It half-quotes Deuteronomy 15:11, whose second half commands the opposite of a shrug: "You shall surely open your hand to your poor and needy brother." Carson draws the distinction tightly: "His followers will always find poor people to help… they will not always have the incarnate Jesus with them." Mercy has every other day of history to work in; this particular jar had one night.

There is a further sharpening worth having. "She did it to prepare me for burial" is not merely a poignant coincidence. Carson notes that the anointing prepares him for burial after the death of a criminal — on his reading, the one circumstance in which the customary anointing of a body would be left undone.^* This is the only funeral honor he will receive on time. The women who come to the tomb with spices will arrive three days late to a body that is not there.

Then the price. Thirty pieces of silver is not a round number chosen for drama. Matthew's verb is the Greek Old Testament's — they weighed out to him — which is Zechariah 11:12 standing in the doorway, and Matthew will name that oracle outright at 27:9–10. The sum itself is set in Exodus 21:32: Carson calls it "the value of a slave accidentally gored to death by an ox."^* The King of Israel had a market price, and it was the going rate for a dead slave.

The Passover that changed hands (26:17–30)

Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher of Antioch whose homilies on Matthew are the oldest sustained commentary we have on this Gospel, asked the question that gets to the heart of this scene: why did Jesus institute this sacrament then, at the Passover, and not on some other evening? His answer was that "where the type is, there He puts the truth."^* Everything in the older meal had been pointing; on this night the thing pointed at sat down at the table and took the bread.

What is missing from the meal is as loud as what is said. At every Passover in Israel's history the host explains the food by pointing backward — this is the bread of affliction our fathers ate in Egypt, this lamb is the lamb whose blood was on the doorposts. Jesus takes the bread, gives thanks, breaks it, and explains it by pointing at himself: "Take, eat; this is my body." The oldest liturgy in his people's life is quietly handed a new referent, and no one at the table objects, because they have not yet understood, and because he has not yet died.

The cup carries the heaviest freight, and the common reading of it needs correcting — including the reading this chapter used to give. It is natural to make Jeremiah 31 the primary text behind the cup, on the strength of the word new. That word is textually doubtful in Matthew: the ESV and NIV read simply "my blood of the covenant," and the versions that print "new" are following a later form of the text. The point is not that the new covenant is absent, only that it does not enter through that adjective. Carson's judgment is the one to follow: "The primary reference is to Exodus 24:8, though other allusions are certainly present."^* Sinai is therefore the nearest text in the room, not the only one; Jeremiah and Isaiah 53 are both audible in the same sentence. Moses throws blood on the people and says, "Behold the blood of the covenant which the LORD has made with you" — sealed with blood that was never his own. Jesus says Sinai's sentence over a cup with one word changed: my blood.

Jeremiah has not left the room; he has simply moved. The clause "for the remission of sins" is where the new covenant actually surfaces in Matthew, because Jeremiah's promise ends, "I will remember their sin no more." And "for many" is not a limit but a crowd: it is the language of Isaiah 53, where the Servant "bore the sin of many," and in that idiom many stands over against one. He is not narrowing the door as he goes through it. He is counting.

And in the middle of it sits Judas, who eats. "Ah! How great is the blindness of the traitor!" Chrysostom wrote. "Even partaking of the mysteries, he remained the same; and admitted to the most holy table, he changed not."^* What arrests us is not that Jesus knew — Matthew has told us he knew — but that Jesus served him anyway, and warned him plainly enough that no one at the table could tell which of them it was. Eleven of them ask, "It isn't me, is it, Lord?" The twelfth asks the same question and says Rabbi.

Then verse 29, which no one expects here: "I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on, until that day when I drink it anew with you in my Father's Kingdom." Carson reads it against the four Passover cups, each matched to one of the promises of Exodus 6:6–7, the last of which is I will be your God: "Thus Jesus is simultaneously pledging that he will drink the “bitter cup” immediately ahead of him and vowing not to drink the cup of consummation, the cup that promises the divine presence, until the kingdom in all its fullness has been ushered in."^* That is Carson’s reading of the vow. The pastoral end of it is ours: he does not merely announce his death, he books a table — and then declines to sit down at it until we are there.

Gethsemane: the cup (26:31–46)

On the way out he tells them what the night will do to them. "All of you will be made to stumble because of me tonight" — skandalizō, the verb Matthew uses for the stone a person trips over, and it is passive: something is going to be done to them. The proof text is Zechariah 13:7, and its grammar is the shock of the sentence: "I will strike the shepherd." Not Judas, not Caiaphas, not Rome. The scattering of the sheep is traced back past every human hand to God's own.

Peter hears a prophecy and answers it with a promise. "Even if all will be made to stumble because of you, I will never." His failure at this point is not cowardice but confidence; Chrysostom thought the fall was permitted precisely to cure the self-reliance in it, and drew from Peter and Judas together the doctrine that "a man's willingness is not sufficient, unless any one receive the succor from above; and that again we shall gain nothing by the succor from above, if there be not a willingness."^*

Then Gethsemane. Matthew says Jesus "began to be sorrowful and severely troubled" — the second verb is adēmoneō, a rare and physical word for distress that presses in until a person can hardly stand under it. And his own description echoes the Psalms: "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death" runs close to the refrain of Psalm 42, "Why are you in despair, my soul?" He is praying his people's oldest words for anguish, and meaning them further down than anyone ever has.

John Calvin, the Geneva reformer, refused every attempt to sand this down. Commentators, he said, had "labored with toil and anxiety to find some way of evading the difficulty. But their labor has been ill-judged and of no use; for if we are ashamed that Christ should experience fear and sorrow, our redemption will perish and be lost." To say why, Calvin borrows a line from Ambrose, the fourth-century bishop of Milan, and sets it inside his own comment: "He grieved for me, who had no cause of grief for himself."

Which brings us to the cup — potērion. In the Prophets a cup handed to someone by God is almost never simply a portion of trouble; it is the cup of his wrath. Isaiah's Jerusalem has "drunk at the hand of the LORD the cup of his wrath." Jeremiah is handed "this cup of the wine of wrath" and told to make the nations drink it. Carson surveys that whole chain of texts and concludes that the Old Testament allusions crowding the passion narrative require the Old Testament meaning here — not a general cup of suffering but the cup of God's wrath, fuller than the cup of 20:22 and pointing forward to the cry of 27:46. If that is the cup, then Jesus is not flinching at nails. Calvin put it as plainly as it can be put: "He had no horror at death, therefore, simply as a passage out of the world, but because he had before his eyes the dreadful tribunal of God, and the Judge himself armed with inconceivable vengeance; and because our sins, the load of which was laid upon him, pressed him down with their enormous weight."

Tim Keller, the Manhattan pastor whose sermons we hold in transcript, preached this garden and made the comparison that settles it. Plenty of Christians have gone to worse deaths more calmly — he names Latimer and Ridley singing at the stake — and the reason is not that Jesus was braver or less brave than they were: "none of his followers ever faced a death like this." They died with a sense of God's presence. He was tasting its withdrawal. And Keller turns that into the one sentence to carry out of the chapter: "The more you understand the wrath of God, the more you'll understand the love of God because the love of God according to the Bible was that he came and took that wrath himself."

"Nevertheless, not what I desire, but what you desire." Everything turns on that hinge, and the house has one honest disagreement to put on the table here. Calvin reads the verse through the two wills — a true human will and the divine will, distinct and unopposed — and names the ancient Monothelite error in his comment on this very verse. He reaches for music to say it: as varying notes are so far from discordant that together they make harmony, "so in Christ there was a remarkable example of adaptation between the two wills, the will of God and the will of man, so that they differed from each other without any conflict or opposition."^*

Carson frames the same moment differently. He puts it as desire ordered under desire: if some other route were morally consistent with the Father's redeeming purpose, that is what Jesus deeply desires — but more deeply still he desires his Father's will, and in this crisis, the worst since the wilderness, he is tempted to look for an alternative to sin-bearing suffering. Carson will even allow that, as with the ignorance Jesus confesses in 24:36, he may not have known whether another way was possible: "he learns only that the cross is unavoidable if he is to obey his Father's will."^*

We stand with Calvin on the doctrine. The two wills are the church's settled confession, and they are what guards the real humanity of Christ. But Carson has caught something Calvin's category can flatten. This is a prayer with a live question inside it, prayed by a man who is finding out. Both readings forbid the picture that ruins the chapter — an angry Father and a reluctant Son — and the tension between them is worth leaving where it is.

He comes back three times and finds them asleep. "Watch and pray, that you don't enter into temptation" — and Calvin's gloss is worth keeping in the pocket: to enter into temptation means to yield to it. Carson adds the detail that takes the scolding out of it: "Even in his own extremity, when he needs and seeks his Father's face, Jesus thinks of the impending but much lesser trial his followers will face." He asked three men for one hour of company and did not get it. The point of the scene is not that they failed him. It is that he went in alone, which is what he came to do.

Twelve legions, unsummoned (26:47–56)

Judas arrives with a crowd and a signal, and Jesus answers the kiss with a word Matthew has used exactly twice before: hetairos. Not philos, the word for a friend of the heart, but "companion" — and in Matthew it is always spoken to somebody who has just come up short: the grumbling laborer in the vineyard, the guest without a wedding garment, and now this. Carson's gloss is exact: "an openhearted but not intimate greeting."^* What follows it in Greek, eph' ho parei, is genuinely unsettled. It can be read as a question — why are you here — or as a command, do what you came for, and the English versions split along that line. Either way it is the last door held open, and Judas walks past it.

Then the sword, and one of the great unused sentences of Scripture: "Do you think that I couldn't ask my Father, and he would even now send me more than twelve legions of angels?" Twelve legions is upward of sixty thousand, and he could have had them for the asking. Elisha's servant once had his eyes opened to see the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire, and the sight was a comfort; here the same reserves are named only to be declined. Chrysostom did the arithmetic out loud: “For if one angel slew one hundred and eighty-five armed thousands… what need of twelve legions against a thousand men?”^* And he saw what the sentence was for. By these words, he wrote, Jesus quenched the disciples’ anger, showing them that this seemed good to the Scriptures as well. "How then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that it must be so?" This is Matthew's fulfillment theme at its costliest: the Scriptures are not a forecast that happened to come true, they are a promise the King is holding himself to, at the price of every legion he could have had.

Two trials, one night (26:57–75)

Matthew now runs two hearings at once, and the seam between them is the point. Inside, Jesus stands before the council and says nothing while false witnesses fail to agree. Outside in the courtyard, Peter sits by the fire and talks. Both men are asked, in effect, the same question — are you who they say you are? Peter answers it three times with a denial, and by the third he is swearing. Jesus, put under oath, answers with Daniel and a psalm: "You will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of the sky."

Read that as a weather forecast and the trial makes no sense. Carson's reading — one among several, but the one that best explains why a bound man's sentence tears a high priest's robes — is better and harder. The pronoun is plural, aimed at the court, and the weight falls on from now on. His judgment is that from then on the council would not see Jesus as he then stood before them, but only “in his capacity as undisputed King Messiah and sovereign Judge.”^* It is not a date on a calendar. It is a change of standing that begins tonight. Daniel's figure comes to the Ancient of Days and is given dominion, and the man they have bound is claiming to be him. The court hears him correctly. That is why they tear their robes.

And then a rooster, and a man remembering a sentence: "He went out and wept bitterly." Matthew leaves him there. Matthew Henry, the English Puritan whose commentary on the whole Bible has sat on family shelves for three centuries, wrote the line that holds it: "Those that have sinned sweetly, must weep bitterly; for, sooner or later, sin will be bitterness."^* John will not tell us until a charcoal fire on a beach that Peter was restored three times over, once for each denial. But the chapter's arrangement has already told us what to expect. On the same night, in the same courtyard, one man handed him over for silver and one man denied him with oaths, and the difference between them was not the size of the failure — it was that one of them went out and wept, and the other went out and could not find his way back. Grace does not ask us not to fail on the night. It asks us to come back. And the man who could not get one hour of company, who is at that moment drinking the cup alone, is the reason there is anywhere to come back to.