Homiletics Analysis: Matthew 27:45–56

Content & Intent

This Text — Content:

Matthew 27:45–56 narrates the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. The passage opens with a supernatural darkness covering the land from the sixth to the ninth hour — three hours of cosmic silence before Jesus cries out in Aramaic, quoting Psalm 22:1: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The cry is misunderstood by bystanders who think he is calling for Elijah. Someone offers him sour wine; others wait to see if Elijah will come. Then Jesus cries out again with a loud voice and yields up his spirit. At the moment of his death, four signs rupture the ordinary world: the temple curtain tears from top to bottom, the earth shakes, rocks split, and tombs open — with many bodies of sleeping saints raised and appearing in Jerusalem after his resurrection. The Roman centurion and those with him, terrified, confess: “Truly this was the Son of God.” The passage closes with a notice of women disciples watching from a distance — Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of Zebedee’s sons — who had followed Jesus from Galilee.

The passage is structured around three movements: (1) the cry of dereliction and the crowd’s confusion (vv. 45–49); (2) the death itself and the signs that follow (vv. 50–53); (3) the witnesses — Gentile soldier and faithful women (vv. 54–56). The movement is from darkness and abandonment to cosmic upheaval to unexpected confession.

This Text — Intent:

God is seeking to establish, beyond all possible dispute, that the death of Jesus is not a tragedy requiring theological rescue — it is the theological event, the hinge of all history, the moment at which the sin-bearing, wrath-absorbing, curtain-tearing, grave-breaking work of atonement is accomplished. The intent is not merely informational but doxological and faith-compelling: God wants the reader to be gripped by what actually happened at Golgotha — that the Son of God was genuinely forsaken so that his people would never be; that cosmic creation bore witness to what human observers largely missed; and that the proper response is the centurion’s confession, not the bystanders’ mockery or idle waiting. God is calling the reader to see the cross as the supreme act of costly, substitutionary love — and to believe.

Subject Sentence: The Son of God is forsaken, dies, and tears open heaven — accomplishing atonement.

Primary Claim: In the death of Jesus, God is not absent but acting — bearing the full weight of divine wrath against sin so that nothing, not even death itself, would stand between His people and His presence. The cross is the claim God is making on every life that beholds it: this is what it cost, and this is what it accomplished — now who do you say he is?

Interpretive Evaluation

The Cry of Dereliction — Was Jesus Merely Quoting a Psalm That Ends in Triumph?

A common interpretive move — especially in traditions nervous about implying any rupture within the Trinity — is to argue that Jesus’ cry in verse 46 (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) is primarily a liturgical citation of Psalm 22, with the implicit message being the psalm’s triumphal conclusion (vv. 22–31) rather than its anguished opening. On this reading, Jesus is pointing forward to vindication, not backward to abandonment; the cry is a coded message of hope, not a genuine lament of desolation.

This reading must be qualified. It is true that Psalm 22 ends in triumph, and it is true that Matthew’s readers, familiar with the Psalter, would have heard the whole psalm resonating. The canonical context is real and should not be suppressed. However, the reading cannot stop there without doing damage to the text. Matthew goes out of his way to emphasize the reality of the cry — rendering it in Aramaic (Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?) before translating it, which functions in the narrative as an insistence on its raw historicity. The bystanders’ confusion (“He is calling Elijah”) is only intelligible if the cry sounded like genuine anguish, not coded triumph. More decisively, Reformed theology — grounded in the logic of penal substitution — insists that the cry reflects a genuine, historic experience of God-forsakenness: Christ, bearing the full weight of his people’s sin, experienced the judicial abandonment that is the proper consequence of sin before a holy God. This is not a permanent ontological rupture within the Trinity, but it is a real, covenantal, substitutionary reality. Acknowledge that the psalm’s triumphal arc belongs in the background; refute the move that dissolves the genuine forsakenness into mere literary citation.

The Signs — Literal or Symbolic?

Liberal-critical scholarship tends to treat the tearing of the curtain, the earthquake, the splitting rocks, and especially the opening of tombs and the appearance of raised saints (vv. 51–53) as theological symbolism — Matthean midrash clothing a bare historical event in apocalyptic imagery to make a theological point. On this reading, these events did not literally occur but are Matthew’s literary strategy for communicating the cosmic significance of the crucifixion.

This reading must be refuted. The text presents these events as historical occurrences in the same narrative register as the darkness, the sour wine, and the women watching at a distance — there is no shift in mode or register that signals allegory or symbol. Matthew’s Gospel does not treat miracles as a different literary species from narrative. Furthermore, the logic of the passage requires literal events: the centurion’s terrified confession is presented as a response to what he witnessed (“When the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place…”), which is only coherent if actual, perceptible events occurred. The theological significance of the signs is real and must be preached — but that significance is carried by the literal events, not instead of them.

The Tearing of the Curtain — Access or Judgment?

Two readings of the torn curtain compete within broadly evangelical scholarship. The majority reading interprets the tearing as the opening of access to God’s presence — the barrier between the Holy of Holies and the people removed by Christ’s atoning death (the Hebrews reading; cf. Heb. 10:19–22). A minority reading, noting that the curtain tears from top to bottom as an act of divine initiative, emphasizes judgment on the temple system — God departing from the temple, or the temple’s impending destruction prefigured. Both readings have genuine textual support within the broader canon.

The Reformed reading acknowledges both dimensions without forcing a false choice. The tearing from top to bottom is unambiguously divine initiative — God acts, not human hands. The primary sense within Matthew’s narrative is the opening of access: the death that the temple system had been foreshadowing in every sacrifice is now accomplished, and the veil that enforced the distance between a holy God and a sinful people is removed. But this simultaneously signals the obsolescence of the Levitical system and anticipates the temple’s destruction in 70 AD. Both are present; access is primary.

The Raised Saints — Resurrection Before Easter?

Verse 53 presents an exegetical puzzle: the tombs open at Jesus’ death (v. 51), but the saints appear in Jerusalem after his resurrection (v. 53). This has generated significant discussion. Some read this as a straightforward sequence with Matthew’s narrative compressed; others read the opening of tombs at death as a proleptic sign, with the appearances occurring only after Easter as Matthew explicitly states. The text itself resolves this: “after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many.” Matthew anchors these appearances to Christ’s resurrection as their enabling cause — these saints are raised not as a separate eschatological event but as the firstfruits of the firstfruits, their raising made possible by and coordinated with Christ’s own resurrection. No significant interpretive tradition disputes this; the puzzle is syntactical, not theological. The event is unique, unrepeated, and eschatologically significant: the resurrection age has dawned.

Key Canonical Support

• Psalm 22:1–31 — The psalm Jesus quotes, running from the cry of dereliction through abandonment imagery to triumphant vindication; the canonical horizon of the cry, with both its anguish and its resolution fully present.

• Isaiah 53:4–6, 10–12 — The Servant who bears the iniquities of many, on whom the LORD lays the punishment that brings peace; the Old Testament’s clearest prophetic grounding for penal substitutionary atonement and the logic of the cry of dereliction.

• Leviticus 16:1–19 — The Day of Atonement, the high priest’s entry through the curtain into the Most Holy Place with blood; the entire sacrificial system the torn veil brings to fulfillment and renders obsolete.

• Hebrews 9:11–14; 10:19–22 — The New Testament’s most direct theological exposition of the torn curtain: Christ as the great high priest who entered the true Holy of Holies through his own blood, opening the new and living way for his people to draw near.

• 1 Corinthians 15:20–23 — Christ as the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep; the raised saints of Matthew 27 as the firstfruits of the firstfruits, anchoring the eschatological logic of the opened tombs within Paul’s resurrection theology.

Aim: To confront every reader with what the death of Jesus actually cost and actually accomplished — and to call forth the centurion’s confession as the only adequate response.

Content Table

Divisions Table

Subject Sentence & Primary Claim (restated)

Subject Sentence: The Son of God is forsaken, dies, and tears open heaven — accomplishing atonement.

Primary Claim: In the death of Jesus, God is not absent but acting — bearing the full weight of divine wrath against sin so that nothing, not even death itself, would stand between His people and His presence. The cross is the claim God is making on every life that beholds it: this is what it cost, and this is what it accomplished — now who do you say he is?

Applications (Five)

1. Receive the forsakenness of Christ as the ground of your acceptance before God. (Mind/Belief) The cry of dereliction is not a moment of divine failure or theological embarrassment — it is the transaction that makes your standing before God possible. Jesus was not merely sad at Golgotha; he was judicially abandoned in the place of every person whose sin deserved that abandonment. If you are tempted to wonder whether God could truly accept you — whether your sin is too habitual, too ugly, too stubborn — hear the cry of verse 46 as your answer: that is what it cost to secure your acceptance. The forsakenness he endured is the precise measure of the welcome you now have.

2. Let the torn curtain reorient your entire posture in prayer. (Will/Behavior) The curtain did not merely tear — it was torn from top to bottom, by God, at the moment his Son died. The barrier enforced for centuries by the entire Levitical system was removed in an instant. This means that every time you approach God in prayer — hesitantly, distantly, as though you need to earn the right to be heard — you are living as if the curtain is still hanging. The cross demands a different posture: bold, expectant, direct access to the Father through the blood of the Son. Pray like someone for whom the way is open, because it is.

3. Stop being a bystander at the cross — the centurion’s confession is the only adequate response. (Will/Behavior) The people in verses 47–49 are not villains — they are spectators. They wait to see what happens. They offer sour wine. They watch for Elijah. They are curious but uncommitted. The centurion — a Gentile soldier with no prior religious stake in Jesus — looks at the earthquake, the darkness, the manner of his dying, and says: “Truly this was the Son of God.” That confession is the passage’s call to every reader. The question is not whether you find the crucifixion historically interesting or theologically plausible. The question is whether you have stopped waiting at a safe distance and spoken the confession the cross demands.

4. Grieve rightly over the weight of what sin required. (Affections/Worship) Three hours of darkness. The Son of God crying out in abandonment. The earth shaking. Rocks splitting. The entire creation convulsing under the weight of what was happening. If your relationship with your own sin has grown casual — if confession has become routine, if repentance has become perfunctory — sit in Matthew 27:45–50 until the weight returns. The darkness was not decoration. The forsakenness was not rhetorical. Your sin required that. Not as a reason for despair but as a reason for the kind of grief that produces genuine hatred of sin and genuine love of the Savior who bore it.

5. Worship the God who acts from top to bottom, not bottom to top. (Affections/Worship) The curtain tears from the top down. God initiates. God removes the barrier. God raises the saints. God confounds the crowd through a Gentile soldier. Every sign at the cross is an act of divine initiative — God doing what human beings could not do, would not do, and did not even recognize as it happened. The proper response to Matthew 27:45–56 is not self-congratulation for being on the right side of history, or relief that things worked out, but awe before the sovereign God who planned, accomplished, and announced the atonement entirely on his own initiative. Worship him for being that kind of God — not a God who waits for human cooperation but a God who tears curtains.

Theological Importance

Theological Importance: Matthew 27:45–56 is among the most theologically dense passages in the entire Gospel corpus. It establishes, through narrative rather than proposition, the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement: the Son of God, bearing the sin of his people, experiences the judicial forsakenness that is sin’s proper consequence before a holy God — so that his people need never experience it. The passage simultaneously establishes the fulfillment and termination of the entire Levitical sacrificial system (the torn curtain), the inauguration of the resurrection age (the opened tombs and raised saints), and the universal scope of the gospel (the Gentile centurion’s confession as the first human declaration at the cross). Every major doctrinal theme in Christian theology — atonement, justification, resurrection, eschatology, the priesthood of Christ, the accessibility of God — has its roots in what happens in these twelve verses. This is not one event in the story of Jesus; it is the event the entire story was moving toward.

Reformed Theological Significance

Reformed Theological Significance: Reformed theology has consistently insisted on penal substitutionary atonement as the heart of the cross, and Matthew 27:45–56 is among its most powerful narrative anchors. The cry of dereliction (v. 46) is the moment that makes forensic justification intelligible: Christ bore the penalty — including the covenantal curse of God-forsakenness — that his people deserved, so that their guilt is genuinely removed, not merely overlooked. The tearing of the curtain confirms that access to God is now entirely through Christ’s accomplished work, not through ongoing Levitical mediation — a point Hebrews develops at length, but Matthew narrates with a single, devastating sentence. The centurion’s confession anticipates the Great Commission (28:19–20) and the extension of covenant blessing to the nations — consistent with the Abrahamic promise structure that underlies Reformed covenant theology. And the voluntary death of Christ (“he yielded up his spirit,” v. 50) preserves the active obedience that is essential to Reformed soteriology: this death is not imposed from outside but given from within, the culmination of a life of perfect covenant-keeping offered as the representative act of the last Adam. The passage is not merely the climax of Matthew’s narrative; it is the fulcrum of the entire redemptive-historical framework that Reformed theology seeks to expound.

Main Takeaway

The death of Jesus was not a tragedy rescued by theology — it was the theology, accomplished in history, signed by darkness and earthquake and a torn curtain. He was forsaken so you would never be. He died so the barrier between you and God would not. The only fitting response to what happened at Golgotha is the centurion’s response: “Truly this was the Son of God” — said not as a historical footnote but as the confession that reorganizes everything.

Preaching/Teaching Pitfalls

• Treating the cry of dereliction as merely a psalm citation, not a genuine experience. The move to protect Trinitarian theology by dissolving the forsakenness into literary allusion is understandable but exegetically dishonest. Matthew goes out of his way to render the cry in Aramaic before translating it — insisting on its raw historical texture. Preach the real forsakenness; explain its Trinitarian limits (this is not an eternal ontological rupture); but do not sand off the edge that makes penal substitution coherent.

• Rushing past the darkness to get to the resurrection. Three hours of darkness is not throat-clearing before the main event. It is creation itself bearing witness to something categorically different from any prior moment in history. Preachers who move too quickly to the triumph fail to let the weight of the cross land. The congregation should feel the darkness before they see the signs.

• Preaching the signs as mere symbolism and stripping them of historicity. The tearing curtain, the earthquake, the raised saints — these are presented as historical events in the same narrative register as the sour wine. Once the expositor signals that these events are “probably symbolic,” the congregation loses the ground beneath their feet. Preach the events as real; then preach their theological significance, which is carried by the events, not substituted for them.

• Skipping or minimizing the raised saints in verses 52–53 as a textual embarrassment. This is one of the most unusual and theologically significant details in the entire passion narrative, and many preachers quietly pass over it. These raised saints are the firstfruits of the resurrection age, their appearing anchored explicitly to Christ’s own resurrection. The passage is claiming that the resurrection of the dead has begun at the cross — a massive eschatological statement that must be preached, not avoided.

• Failing to press the contrast between the crowd and the centurion. The bystanders in verses 47–49 are not hostile — they are merely waiting, watching, offering wine, speculating about Elijah. Their failure is not malice but indifference masquerading as curiosity. The centurion’s confession emerges from the same events and produces a completely different response. This contrast is not incidental; it is the passage’s challenge to every reader who considers themselves a fair-minded observer of Christianity without having yet made the centurion’s confession.

• Missing the women as a structural element, not a parenthetical. Verses 55–56 are not biographical footnotes. The women watching from a distance are the faithful thread connecting the cross to the empty tomb — they will be the first witnesses of the resurrection. Matthew names them here because their presence at the cross is what makes their testimony at the resurrection credible. Do not skip the names; these are real people whose faithfulness at the worst moment in history will become the ground of the church’s first Easter announcement.