My God, My God

Read

Read this chapter slowly. It is the only one in Matthew that earns that instruction explicitly — not because the others are less important, but because this one is different in weight. Everything in the gospel has been moving toward this morning.

Matthew tells the crucifixion plainly. He does not embellish it or make it theological before letting it be physical. The events carry their own meaning. Read before the walk-through and let the chapter be what it is.

Walk-through

Judas, Pilate, and innocent blood (verses 1–26)

At dawn the chief priests and elders bind Jesus and hand him to Pilate.

Judas, seeing that Jesus has been condemned, is filled with remorse. He brings the thirty silver pieces back to the priests: I have sinned — I betrayed innocent blood. They say: what is that to us? He throws the coins into the temple and goes and hangs himself. The priests take the money and buy a potter's field as a burial place for strangers, since it is blood money — too tainted for the treasury.

"I have sinned in that I betrayed innocent blood."

Matthew 27:4

The acknowledgment is exact and the guilt is real. But Judas goes to the wrong place with it — toward despair and self-destruction rather than toward the one who could receive it. The contrast with Peter is implicit: Peter also failed, also wept. But he did not go the way of the coins into the temple. He waited. The chapter does not resolve Peter's story yet.

Before Pilate, Jesus is silent. The chief priests and elders accuse him; he gives no answer. Pilate is amazed. He offers the crowd a choice — Barabbas or Jesus. His wife sends word: have nothing to do with that righteous man; I suffered much today in a dream because of him. Pilate knows. His own household knows.

So when Pilate saw that nothing was being gained, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, "I am innocent of the blood of this righteous man. You see to it." All the people answered, "His blood be on us and on our children!"

Matthew 27:24–25

Pilate's gesture is futile. You cannot wash away guilt by announcing your innocence while handing an innocent man to be killed. He had the authority to release Jesus. He did not use it. The crowd's cry — his blood be on us — became one of the most tragically misused verses in Christian history to justify violence against Jewish people. That misuse has no warrant: the crowd's words are a statement of assumption of responsibility, not a permanent curse on a people. Matthew records it as part of the story; it was not meant to function as a license for persecution.

Barabbas — a known prisoner, a man guilty of what Jesus is not guilty of — is released. Jesus is handed over to be crucified.

The mockery (verses 27–44)

Soldiers take Jesus into the praetorium. They strip him and put a scarlet robe on him, a crown of thorns on his head, a reed in his right hand. They kneel: hail, King of the Jews! They spit on him, strike his head with the reed. Then strip the robe, put his clothes back on him, and lead him away.

Everything they do to mock him is, without their knowing it, true. He is the King of the Jews. He is the one who should be worshipped. The symbols of kingship — robe, crown, sceptre, kneeling subjects — are present in degraded forms, and the degradation does not change what they signify. The soldiers are performing the truth while intending parody.

They compel a man from Cyrene named Simon to carry the cross. They come to Golgotha — Place of the Skull. They offer him wine mixed with gall; he tastes it and refuses. They crucify him.

Above his head: THIS IS JESUS THE KING OF THE JEWS. The charge they intend as accusation is the caption the gospel has been writing all along.

"You who destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross!" Likewise the chief priests also mocking, with the scribes, the Pharisees, and the elders, said, "He saved others, but he can't save himself."

Matthew 27:40–42

He saved others but he cannot save himself. They say this as a taunt. It is the precise truth of what is happening. He is saving others by not saving himself. The cross is not a failure of power but an exercise of it — the power to absorb violence without returning it, to remain in love at the point of maximum cost. The mockers have stumbled onto an explanation of the atonement without realising it.

The death (verses 45–56)

From noon until three in the afternoon, darkness covers the whole land.

About the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" That is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Matthew 27:46

This is the opening line of Psalm 22. Jesus is praying. In his worst moment — in physical agony, in public humiliation, in what feels like divine abandonment — he is still addressing God. He has not let go of the relationship. He cries out into the silence with the same words the psalmist used, words that begin in desolation and end, by the psalm's closing verses, in vindication and praise.

My God, my God. Not: where is God. Not: there is no God. My God — still his, even now, even here. The address is the prayer.

Some bystanders mishear and think he is calling for Elijah. Someone runs to offer sour wine on a sponge. Others wait to see if Elijah comes.

Then Jesus cries out again with a loud voice and yields up his spirit.

Behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from the top to the bottom. The earth quaked and the rocks were split.

Matthew 27:51

The curtain that separated the holy of holies from the rest of the temple — the innermost sanctuary where God's presence dwelt, accessible only to the high priest once a year, on the Day of Atonement — tears from top to bottom. It tears from top: not from the bottom up by human hands, but from the top down. The tearing is from God's side. The separation between God and the people that the whole sacrificial system had managed across centuries is over. The way is open.

The earth shakes. Rocks split. Tombs open. Matthew records that the bodies of saints came out after Jesus' resurrection and appeared in Jerusalem. It is a strange and compressed account, pointing forward to the resurrection morning — the death of Jesus already beginning to reverse death itself.

Then, standing at the foot of the cross:

Now the centurion and those who were with him watching Jesus, when they saw the earthquake and the things that were done, were filled with awe and said, "Truly this was the Son of God!"

Matthew 27:54

A Roman officer. A soldier of the occupying empire. A Gentile with no stake in Israel's covenant. He sees what the chief priests and Pharisees could not see, what Peter fled before, what the disciples were absent for. He names what the whole gospel has been building toward: this is the Son of God.

The women are there. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, the mother of Zebedee's sons. They watched from a distance. The disciples scattered in chapter 26. The women stayed.

The burial (verses 57–66)

A wealthy disciple named Joseph of Arimathea asks Pilate for the body. Pilate grants it. Joseph wraps the body in clean linen and lays it in his own new tomb, cut into rock, and rolls a great stone against the entrance. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary sit opposite the tomb and watch.

The next day — the Sabbath — the chief priests and Pharisees go to Pilate: that deceiver said he would rise in three days. Seal the tomb and set a guard. Pilate grants it. They seal the stone and post a guard.

They are taking seriously what the disciples have not yet believed.

Take with you

The chapter has many moments, but the cry from the cross holds them together.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He did not go silent at the worst moment. He prayed into the darkness. He addressed it to God with the possessive — my God — even as he asked why God had abandoned him. The abandonment and the faith exist in the same breath.

Psalm 22, which begins with that cry, ends with these words: For he has not despised nor scorned the suffering of the afflicted; neither has he hidden his face from him; but when he cried to him, he heard. The psalm Jesus was praying from the cross ends in vindication. He knew how the psalm ended. He was in the middle of it.

The curtain tore from top to bottom. Access to God, which had been mediated and restricted and carefully managed for centuries, was opened. Not by a religious programme or a priestly ritual or a theological argument. By this.

A Roman soldier saw it. The women stayed and watched. The tomb was sealed. And the stone was waiting.