The Only Coronation He Was Given

The silver comes back (27:1–10)

Matthew 27 is the day the Gospel has been walking toward since Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus first told his disciples plainly that he must suffer and die (16:21), and it opens with a formality. The council met at night and decided at night; now, at dawn, it meets again to make the decision legal, binds Jesus, and hands him to Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect of Judea, because Rome alone could execute. Then, before the trial can begin, Matthew stops the narrative for a man who is not in the room.

Judas "felt remorse" — metamelomai, a word for the sick turn of the stomach when a thing is done and cannot be undone. Matthew has another word available and does not use it: metanoeō, the word John preached in the wilderness and Jesus preached from his first sermon on. The difference is not that one grief is sincere and the other counterfeit; Judas's grief is agonizing and real. The difference is direction. Repentance turns toward God. Judas turns toward the chief priests — the only people in Jerusalem structurally incapable of absolving anyone — makes the truest confession in the chapter, "I have sinned in that I betrayed innocent blood," and receives back the emptiest sentence in the chapter: "What is that to us? You see to it." He had everything repentance needs except an address to send it to. Which is worth saying slowly, because the address exists. It is the man he sold, who was at that hour being bound for exactly this.

The word "innocent" there is athōos, and it is worth marking, because Matthew will use it exactly once more. It will come out of the mouth of Pilate, over a basin, twenty verses later. Two men in this chapter declare Jesus innocent and hand him over anyway. One goes out and hangs himself. The other washes his hands and goes to lunch.

Then the priests, who a moment ago could not be troubled by blood-guilt, become scrupulous about bookkeeping: "It's not lawful to put them into the treasury, since it is the price of blood." They will not defile the offering box with money they themselves paid out. So they buy a field, and Matthew notes what it was for — burying strangers. The first thing ever purchased with the price of Jesus is a grave for outsiders. In Jeremiah 19 the potter’s valley is renamed a burial place as a judgment; here the renaming is the same and the use is not, because Matthew’s last sentence sends the church to all nations (28:19). Read it as bleak irony if you like. The Gospel does not leave it there.

The fulfillment note at 27:9 is the chapter's famous difficulty: Matthew says "Jeremiah," and the thirty pieces of silver plainly come from Zechariah 11:12–13. D. A. Carson — the Canadian New Testament scholar whose commentary on Matthew is the modern voice we lean on most through this Gospel — surveys the proposed escapes and takes none of them. He thinks the quotation is a fusion, and that the frame is Jeremiah 19, where the prophet buys a potter's jar, goes to the valley of Hinnom, and names the place a burial ground because the city has filled it with innocent blood. The silver is Zechariah's; the field, the potter, the blood and the renamed graveyard are Jeremiah's. "Jeremiah alone is mentioned, perhaps because he is the more important of the two prophets, and perhaps also because, though Jeremiah 19 is the less obvious reference, it is the more important as to prophecy and fulfillment."^* Not a proof-text ticked off, and not a slip; a whole shape of Scripture arriving at its meaning.

Two prisoners, one name (27:11–26)

"Are you the King of the Jews?" Jesus answers, "So you say" — a reply that neither denies the charge nor cooperates with the framing. And then nothing. "He gave him no answer, not even one word, so that the governor marveled greatly." A Roman governor's entire craft was the extraction of statements, and Matthew records not his verdict but his astonishment. Behind the silence stands Isaiah's servant, who "didn't open his mouth" (Isaiah 53:7); the King defends himself by declining to.

Then Barabbas. A handful of early manuscripts give his name as Jesus Barabbas — Jesus, son of the father — though the evidence for it is narrow and Carson will not build on it. What he does correct is the picture most of us carry. Barabbas is not a thief with a sack. The word is lēstēs, which in this period means an insurrectionist — Carson calls him "no ordinary villain," and notes that Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, uses the word constantly of the Zealots. The adjective Matthew gives him, episēmos, is neutral in Greek — Carson glosses it as notable or conspicuous, and points out that the only other New Testament use of it is a compliment. Barabbas may have been a man of standing in his own movement, not a name that crowd was ashamed of. So the choice offered to the crowd is sharper than we usually make it. Both men were popular. One had taken up a sword against Rome and one had refused to. The guilty man walks free and the innocent man is bound in his place, and the Gospel does not pause to explain it, because there is nothing to explain. John Calvin, the Geneva reformer, thought Pilate had picked Barabbas deliberately, as the most repellent name on the list, so that shame alone would make the crowd choose Jesus — and Calvin’s flat sentence is that no disgrace made them afraid to ask for him anyway. Barabbas is the one man in Jerusalem who could say with complete literalness that Jesus died instead of him.

Two warnings reach Pilate and he ignores both. His wife sends word of a dream and calls Jesus "that righteous man" — a Gentile woman speaking the truth, in a Gospel that opened with Gentile stargazers doing the same. And Pilate's own reading of the case is on record: "he knew that because of envy they had delivered him up." He is not fooled. He is simply outvoted by a crowd he had the authority to overrule.

So he takes water. The gesture comes from Deuteronomy 21:6–9, where the elders of a town wash their hands over a corpse to swear they did not do it and do not know who did. Pilate knows exactly who did it. He is performing an ignorance he does not have, in a rite that requires the ignorance he does not have, and pronouncing himself athōos — Judas's word. Matthew Henry, the English Puritan whose commentary on the whole Bible has sat on family shelves for three centuries, reads the basin exactly: the washing was done “not as if he thought thereby to cleanse himself from any guilt contracted before God, but to acquit himself before the people.”^* Then he releases Barabbas and hands Jesus over. Matthew has just shown us the two ways of refusing responsibility for the same death: despair, and paperwork.

And the crowd answers, "May his blood be on us, and on our children." Of all the sentences in Matthew, this one has done the most damage, and it has done it by being read as something it is not. The formula is a standard oath of blood-guilt — "your blood be on your own head" (2 Samuel 1:16) — by which speakers accept liability for a death they are causing. It is sworn here by a particular crowd in a particular courtyard, and Matthew, a Jew writing for a largely Jewish church, is not indicting a people; every disciple, every woman at the cross, and Matthew himself belong to it. The clause "and on our children" reads most naturally, as in chapters 23 and 24, of the generation that lived to see Jerusalem fall — and Carson adds the note that keeps even that from hardening: if the verse looks ahead to AD 70, it does so in the manner of Jeremiah prophesying the exile, which is to say within the covenant and in hope of return, not as a final verdict on a people.^* And the harder, better thing must be said too: the blood they call down is the blood poured out the night before over the cup at supper — "for many for the remission of sins" (26:28). They asked for it; it is the only thing that could have saved them; Acts 2 records three thousand of them receiving it that way within two months.

The coronation (27:27–31)

The soldiers' game is the most concentrated irony in the Gospel. They empaizō him — the verb Matthew uses three times in this chapter (27:29, 31, 41), built on the word for a child, so that "to mock" is at root "to play with." A whole cohort turns out for it. They give him a robe, a crown, a scepter; they kneel; they hail him. Every element of a coronation is present and every element is wrong — the robe a cast-off, the crown thorn, the scepter a reed, the homage a joke — and Matthew records it without correcting it, because it is the only coronation this King is given and the Gospel has spent twenty-six chapters arguing that this is where he reigns. They say the true thing in the false tone. So does the placard Pilate hangs over his head: THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS. Posted as a criminal charge. Read ever since as the headline.

Golgotha (27:32–44)

Simon of Cyrene is conscripted, and so the man who carries the cross of Christ that day is a North African bystander who did not volunteer. Be careful what we make of him. Simon carries the beam; he does not carry the weight, and nothing he does that morning saves anyone, least of all himself. The one who is carrying the actual load is the man walking in front of him. But there is a kindness in the picture for anyone who has found the following of Jesus arriving as an assignment rather than a choice: the first person ever made to take up that cross did not choose it either, and he is remembered by name. Then the drugged wine, sour and cut with gall (Psalm 69:21), and he tastes it and will not drink. Whatever the next six hours will be, he means to meet them undulled.

Matthew narrates the crucifixion itself in four words — "when they had crucified him" — and spends his ink on what was said. Three waves of mockery break over the cross, and they are structurally identical. "If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross." That is the grammar of the wilderness temptations exactly — if you are the Son of God, said twice by the devil in chapter 4 (4:3, 6); the last temptation arrives in the same clause as the first, and is answered the same way, by staying put. The chief priests add the sentence that is truer than they know: "He saved others, but he can't save himself." They intend a contradiction. It is a causal chain. The two clauses are joined by therefore, not but. And in verse 43 they quote Psalm 22:8 almost verbatim, which means the mockers are reciting, unaware, the psalm their victim is about to pray. Carson makes that detail load-bearing: the taunt is he trusts in God, said as a joke, and the cry four verses later proves it was the plain truth.^*

Darkness, and a cry (27:45–50)

At noon the light fails and does not come back for three hours. Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher of Antioch whose homilies on Matthew are the oldest sustained commentary we have on this Gospel, argued that this was no eclipse, and his reasoning is still the plain one — an eclipse lasts moments, not a quarter of a day. He may be right about the mechanism or he may not;^* the meaning is not obscure either way: darkness at midday is what the prophets called down on the day of the LORD (Amos 8:9), and it arrives at the hour the Passover lambs are killed.

Then the cry: Eli, Eli, lima sabachthani — the opening line of Psalm 22, the only prayer of Jesus in Matthew that does not begin "Father." The verb behind "forsaken" is enkataleipō, "to leave behind, to abandon in a place." Two readings tempt us and both fail. The first empties the words: he was only quoting a psalm that ends in triumph, so nothing much happened. Carson states the rule that kills that reading — Old Testament texts are often quoted with their whole context in view, but "they are never cited in such a way that the OT context effectively annuls what the text itself affirms."^* Psalm 22 does end in vindication, and in Matthew that vindication is chapter 28, not verse 46. The second reading breaks the Godhead: the Father turned away in disgust, the Trinity ruptured for an afternoon. That is worse, and Scripture will not carry it.

Between those two ditches there is a real difference among friends, and it is worth seeing rather than smoothing. Calvin insisted as strongly as anyone that something real happened here — that Christ "should be placed as a guilty person at the judgment-seat of God," and that those who reduce his suffering to the outward punishment of the flesh are "widely mistaken"^* — and he was equally firm that the abandonment did not overthrow the faith by which Jesus held on: he still says my God, twice, and the shield of that possessive answers the complaint. Carson presses further. He thinks it inadequate to say that Jesus felt abandoned without being abandoned, since a man who had lived in the mutual knowing of Father and Son that Jesus describes at 11:27 would know the difference. "It is better to take the words at face value: Jesus is conscious of being abandoned by his Father." And then Carson stops, which is the part worth copying: "If we ask in what ontological sense the Father and the Son are here divided, the answer must be that we do not know because we are not told."^*

We think both men are saying the thing the other is guarding. Calvin is guarding the eternal love that no cross could sever; Carson is guarding the reality of what the Son bore in our place. And Carson supplies the sentence that holds them together: "Trusting God and being abandoned are not mutually exclusive—not in David’s experience, and not in Jesus’ experience."^* The Son bore, in our place and in his humanity, the desolation our sin has earned, and he bore it praying. He was forsaken so that the last promise of this Gospel — "I am with you always" — could be made without a lie in it.

Matthew's account of the death is strange and deliberate. He does not say Jesus died. He says he cried out again and yielded up his spirit — released it, handed it over. Even here he is not being taken. He is giving.

What tore (27:51–56)

And then the temple curtain — katapetasma, the heavy veil hung to keep everyone out of the Most Holy Place — splits from top to bottom. The direction is the sermon. No hand reached up. Chrysostom put it as plainly as it can be put: what had been unapproachable is now to be entered. Calvin adds the timing, which is the whole argument: the veil could not be torn until the sacrifice of expiation was finished, and when it was, the tearing was "in some respects, an opening of heaven." Carson names what that opening costs and what it proves: free access into the presence of a holy God is possible "only because sin has been paid for and the judgment of God averted."^* The building where God met his people under guard is opened by the death of the man the building was always about.

Then an earthquake, split rocks, and the passage every commentator slows down for: tombs opened, many bodies of the holy ones raised, coming out after his resurrection and appearing in the city. Here Carson corrects a reading this chapter used to leave standing — the picture of bodies raised on Friday afternoon and then waiting politely in open tombs until Sunday. The Greek starts a new sentence, and the raising is tied to Easter, not to the death: "The resurrection of “the holy people” begins a new sentence and is tied up only with Jesus’ resurrection." The earthquake and the opened tombs belong to the Friday; the risen holy ones belong to the Sunday; Matthew has set them side by side because the cross and the resurrection are one event with two halves. Calvin's instinct was already running that way — a few raised as sign and firstfruits, because the head has gone through death and the members will follow.

And a Roman officer, watching a man die badly, says the sentence: "Truly this was the Son of God." It is the exact phrase the mockers had used as a conditional twenty verses earlier. How much the centurion meant by it we cannot know; Carson is careful here, noting that the Greek carries no article, so the soldiers may have meant a divine being in the pagan sense, while the same construction can equally carry the full confession, and that "what the soldiers meant by the expression and what Matthew meant need not be exactly the same thing."^* Matthew means all of it. In this Gospel, Gentiles kneel at the cradle and a Gentile confesses at the cross; the door has been open the whole time.

Then the women, named. Chrysostom noticed what they cost themselves and told his congregation the obvious thing: "Let us men imitate the women; let us not forsake Jesus in temptations." It is worth saying without softening it: the eleven ran, and the church's eyewitness account of the death on which everything depends comes to us from women who stayed. Tim Keller, the Manhattan pastor whose sermons we hold in transcript, was preaching on Isaiah 49 rather than on this chapter when he put the cross and the hands together: "the nails of Jesus are the tools with which our names are engraved on the palms of the hands." The women who watched from a distance could not have known that. They were watching the engraving. Keller’s point in that sermon was that our names are cut into something "more precious than stones, more precious than diamonds"^* — which is a strange thing to say about a scar, and exactly right about this one.

A borrowed tomb, a sealed stone (27:57–66)

Joseph of Arimathaea is rich, a member of the council, and a secret disciple who stops being secret at the worst possible moment. He asks Pilate for the body — a request that identifies him publicly with an executed rebel — and buries Jesus in his own new tomb. Isaiah had said the servant would be "with a rich man in his death" (53:9). The man who owned the grave gave it away; the man in it would not need it long.

The last scene belongs to the priests, and it is almost funny. They come to Pilate quoting Jesus back accurately — "After three days I will rise again" — which makes them, on that Saturday, the only people in Jerusalem who remembered the promise. The disciples had forgotten it; his enemies had it by heart. They ask for a koustōdia, a Latin word Matthew keeps in Greek dress because the thing itself is Roman, and Pilate gives them one. So they seal the stone and post the watch, and every precaution they take will become, three days later, part of the evidence.

Matthew ends the chapter on Pilate’s line and lets it stand without comment: "Go, make it as secure as you can." Henry heard a taunt in it — the sentence "looks like a banter," he wrote, of their fears or their hopes: do your worst, and if he be of God he will rise in spite of you and all your guards.^*