Matthew notifies us of the end of Book V the same way he has notified his divisions all along with the usual editorial phrase - but with one slight difference. This time he says "When Jesus had finished all these sayings ..." because with the completion of Book V he has completed his record of the teaching of Jesus. Now the Passion narrative begins, in which the focus is on the Lord's actions rather than upon His words. The time has come to turn from teaching to action, such action as will result in Him becoming more than a teacher: the Lord of the Church and the World, to whom all authority in heaven and in earth is given. Matthew has already shown us that the Son of Man will not come to power the way earthly rulers do, but by an act of service, 'giving His life a ransom for many.' (20:25 ƒƒ)
Now Jesus will be seen to practise what He has preached.
First we plot our journey over the remaining chapters.
i. The whole section begins and ends with words of Jesus. They are a 'wrap-around' to the whole of the Epilogue, and supply a commentary on it.
At its beginning (26:2) Jesus says: "You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified." In Matthew's Gospel it is the fourth and final prediction of His Passion which Jesus makes to His disciples. At its end (28:18-20) Jesus says: "All authority is given to me. Going into all nations therefore, make disciples, baptising and teaching them and encouraging them in obedience to Me." It is by way of the Cross that He will move to His Crown. The Son of Man will suffer ... and be glorified.
ii. The Epilogue is almost entirely occupied with the events of just five days - the Wednesday of Holy Week through to the Sunday of the Resurrection. In the language John remembered Jesus so often using, "His hour has come." In these events the revelation of God that Jesus brought to the world reaches its full and final unfolding.
Inscribed upon the Cross we see, in shining letters, "God is Love."
iii. The book falls naturally into 27 paragraphs - three groups of nine each:
The first nine take us up to Gethsemane;
The second nine describe the Lord's arrest and trial;
The third nine relate the crucifixion, death and resurrection.
Again we see how 'crafted' Matthew's Gospel is.
There is a close parallel between this last part of his Gospel and the first:
a) The trials Jesus faced pair off with His temptations in the wilderness.
Temptation 1: Gethsemane:
Man shall not live by bread alone (4:3) : the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak (26:41)
Temptation 2: The Crucifixion: If you are the Son of God ...
Throw yourself down (4:6) : Come down from the Cross (27:40)
Temptation 3: The Trials:
Fall down and worship me (4:9) : He was silent (26:63, 27:14)
b) His death here pairs up with His baptism ('I have a baptism to be baptised with ...' is how Jesus Himself referred to His death).
c) His removal from Jerusalem to Galilee after the resurrection in ch. 28 matches His withdrawal in ch. 2 to 'Galilee of the Nations,' for the Gentile Mission was the Lord's aim from the beginning.
d) The last word in the
Gospel: "Lo I am with you always," lines
up against the first word in the Gospel: "His name is Immanuel, God
with us."
The beginning and the ending of the Gospel are in balance; the end
unfolds what was implicit in the beginning.
iv. In each book Matthew embeds an Old Testament quotation which supplies a statement of that book's major theme, as we have noted. In this final book he includes two in fact, at 26:31: "It is written, 'I will strike the Shepherd and the sheep will be scattered'," and at 27:9: "And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him on whom a price had been set." We shall look more closely at these as we proceed; for now note that the choice of those two Scriptures indicate that the meaning of the Saviour's passion is the judgment upon sin He will endure as the price to be paid for our salvation.
With these two Old Testament quotations we may wrap up in the same parcel the summary reference to this 'fulfilment' theme by Jesus Himself, 26:56, "All this has taken place that the Scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled." He knew that He was living out these last days of His life to 'the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.'
We turn now to the opening episodes in chapter 26:1-16.
These verses fall into four quite distinguishable segments:
i. Jesus makes the fourth and final prediction of His passion and death;
ii. The authorities plot to arrest Jesus and put Him to death;
iii. A woman anoints Jesus;
iv. Judas resolves to betray Jesus.
The whole section has a brooding air of death, hate and betrayal hanging over it; the woman's devotion is a vivid contrast to it all, but Jesus sees death even in that! Matthew here achieves what Mark achieved in his Gospel by a different literary technique - a sense that the darkness of the world closed in on Him, seeking to overcome the light that shone from Him. It attacked Him from without (the chief priests and elders) and from within (Judas from among the twelve). Even the disciples fail to show the perception or the devotion the woman showed. They are sadly out of touch with their Master, strangers to the spirit of love with which He has all along striven to imbue them. The darkness has indeed closed in.
There is an ironic touch in v. 5: "Not during the feast," the rulers of Jewry said, as they plotted to seize and do away with Him. But happen during the Feast it did. Who is really in charge of events here? Not the men who fancy themselves the masters! A power is at work - unseen - which no-one has eyes to see save Jesus Himself, and in a dim fashion, a sprinkling of folk like the woman who anointed Jesus. "The rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His anointed ... but He that sitteth in the Heavens has them in derision." (Psalm 2:4) In their posturing arrogance and fancied mastery they are quite blind to the fact that they are as puppets dancing to strings Another pulls.
The Lord's statement in v. 1, "You know that after two days the Passover comes" tells us that what Matthew now records happened on the Wednesday of Holy Week. After three tumultuous days, in which the intellectual and spiritual output which is recorded of Jesus has been prodigious, He takes this Wednesday as a rest day. From the morning of the next day He will not sleep again until He dies.
He dines in a village home. He is among friends here. Pair this up with John 12:1-8, and it is clear that this was something of a family gathering: Martha served, Lazarus was there at table (v. 9 suggests that Lazarus did not make too many public appearances), and the woman who anointed Jesus was in fact Mary his sister.
What lay behind Mary's action? Was it the presence of her brother Lazarus there that moved her so profoundly? Her faith had failed so dismally at the time he had died. Then she had witnessed the unbelievable: she had seen her dead brother raised to life by the authoritative word of Jesus, the Rabbi whom she so deeply revered. And seeing Lazarus there now, alive and well and in high spirits no doubt, sharing table fellowship again with the One Who had restored him to life, drew all her perceptions of Jesus together in a rush of pure gratitude and adoration. She was swept along on a flood of adoring love, helpless against its tide to do ought but yield to the impulse to pour out her gratitude in the gift to Him of her most precious possession.
The reason she poured it over His feet and His head is that it was the custom in that society first to wash the feet of guests as they came in off the street to a meal (for they would have had to walk in open sandals through narrow streets which served as town drains and sewage conduits), and then to anoint their head with oil when they reclined at table (for they sat in a verandah-like section of the house which faced inward toward a courtyard open to the sky, and after mid-day the sun's rays would slant in toward the table; the oil was a protection against the sun). You washed their feet and anointed their head. Culturally, therefore, Mary's was a natural way to express a welcome. What was unnatural was what she poured. In the strict sense it was a waste; it served no useful purpose. "This ointment might have been sold for a 'large sum' and given to the poor." Why waste your affection on Jesus when there and waifs and strays to 'do for'? People say the same sort of thing today with the same sort of hypocrisy. "How can you justify spending all that money on space travel, or on missions, when there are so many starving multitudes in the world?" the pious bleaters ask ... on their way home from the purchase of a second car and another colour TV for the rumpus room.
Three hundred denarii was their estimate of its worth, we learn from Mark 14:5. A denarius was the standard day's wage paid to a working man. That makes the gift worth 5/6ths of a year's wages. (Let a Mission challenge us to set aside for its support one week's wages in the year - one 52nd part of a year's income, far less even than a tithe - and we protest it is asking a lot.) It was a reckless, extravagant gesture. It was far and away the most precious thing Mary had. And there was no chance she could recover any of it if later she regretted the impulse: John tells us she 'broke' the jar to pour it out. Once she had yielded to the impulse, her treasure was gone for ever.
To what have we 'kissed goodbye' for Jesus? Whose level of affection is high enough to be moved to do such a thing? Do we give simply out of love for Him? Or is there a poison in our roots that still asks, "What's in it for me?" For whose satisfaction do we do what we do? She had nard for His head and tears for His feet; do our gifts compare with that? We criticise conduct like hers because we feel it uneasily to be above our own reach. But when did earthly lovers ever concern themselves with the usefulness of their gifts to each other?
"Poor Mary!" wrote Alexander MacLaren; "She had but yielded to the uncalculating impulse of her great love, and she found herself accused of imprudence, waste, and a heartless neglect of the poor. No wonder her gentle heart was 'troubled.' But Jesus threw the shield of His approval over her - and that was enough." It is still enough. Anything that has 'For Christ's sake' stamped on it is thereby a holy thing; the 'altar' sanctifies both gift and giver, as Jesus said.
Said Alexander MacLaren again, "There is a place in Christ's treasury for useless deeds, if they are a pure expression of love to Him; and Mary's alabaster box, which did no good at all, lies beside the cups that held cold water and slaked thirsty lips." (Alexander MacLaren, 'Expositions of Holy Scripture, St Matthew IX-XXVIII' [Eerdmans] p. 222)
Would we condemn on the same grounds all the hymns of Christian poets, all the heroisms of Christian martyrs, and all the sacrifices of Christian workers?
Mary was an embarrassment, of course. It was not seemly. Why, the woman let her hair down in public! No decent woman would dream of doing such a thing, least of all when men were present. She offended against all the niceties. She would not have found a very ready acceptance in many churches. The woman was a hysterical nuisance with no sense of propriety, spilling expensive stuff about, losing control of herself and sobbing all over the place - even over the rabbi's feet, would you believe.
Do extravagant gestures embarrass us? And if they do, is it because we are strangers to love, to the real thing? It did not embarrass Jesus, at all. If it embarrasses us, just how out of sympathy with Jesus are we? Jesus Himself is about to 'waste' His life for the world - another extravagant gesture. And that will be done in singular bad taste too; there will be no refinement in it - strung up stark naked in a public place in the heat of the day and the dust and flies. There was nothing 'proper' about the sacrifice He made for us - nothing dignified at all.
We are a thin-spirited bunch of stuffed shirts. I find myself crying inwardly as I ponder this episode, "God have mercy on my narrow, stuffy, wizened soul." To which of the two are we nearer: to Mary who gave like that, or to Judas whose eye was on the money coming in rather than on the Lord Who was going out?
She anointed His head. Apart from the social custom we have observed, anointing the head was done for two other reasons: to anoint a king (so David and others, II Kings 9:5), and to anoint the dead, to preserve the body while the time-consuming burial procedures were undertaken in so hot a climate. Jesus interprets her action as an anointing of His body for burial, because in all the real indecency that was going on, the getting Him killed, there was not going to be an opportunity for the job to be done properly. It would have been a shame if the Son of God were to be denied the simple dignity of a proper burial. We piously lament the fact that a genius like Mozart ended his life in an unmarked pauper's grave. If Mozart merited a dignified burial and a marked grave, Jesus merited them, surely, a thousand times more.
It was very fitting that there should have been granted to her the honour she sought to do another. "What she has done will be published," Jesus said ... endlessly celebrated down the corridors of time. What would we have? To hear, endlessly chanted as Pilate must, "Suffered under Pontius Pilate ... suffered under Pontius Pilate ... suffered under Pontius Pilate ..." Or to hear, endlessly chanted, "She did it for me ... she did it for me ... she did it for me ...!"
What are they preparing to chant over me for the next ten thousand years?
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