Matthew 26

The Last Supper in Matthew is both a Passover meal and the founding event of the Christian eucharist. The connection to Passover is explicit — the chapter is dated from the first day of Unleavened Bread — and the eucharistic words over the bread and cup are the earliest form of the institution narrative in canonical form (Paul's version in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 predates Matthew's writing). The words over the cup — this is my blood of the covenant, poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins — echo Exodus 24:8 (the blood of the covenant at Sinai) and Isaiah 53:12 (the servant who was poured out for many). The addition of for the forgiveness of sins is unique to Matthew among the gospels and connects the Last Supper directly to the purpose named at the beginning of the gospel: he will save his people from their sins.

The Gethsemane prayer is the gospel's most intimate portrait of Jesus and the most explicit rendering of the tension between the human will that recoils from the cup and the submission that aligns itself with the Father's will. The three prayers, each returning to the same petition with the same resolution, and the three times the disciples sleep, are a sustained contrast: Jesus' total wakefulness in prayer against the disciples' inability to watch one hour. The prayer's resolution — not as I will but as you will — is the gospel's deepest expression of what the Sermon on the Mount had called the will of the Father: the one who prays thy will be done now enacts it at the point of maximum cost. The disciples' flight and Peter's denial complete the narrative of the twelve's failure that the Passion has been anticipating since Caesarea Philippi.