The sermon opens Matthew's Passion narrative, beginning at Matthew 26:1-16, and situates it against the backdrop of the Passover. Jesus tells his disciples plainly that in two days the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified, even as Caiaphas and the chief priests are secretly plotting in the high priest's palace to arrest and kill him. The sermon insists this timing is not incidental: the Passion begins deliberately at Passover, because Jesus himself is the fulfillment of what that feast has always pointed toward.

The sermon retraces the original Passover in Exodus as the interpretive key. When the Lord came down to strike every firstborn in Egypt, he came not merely against the Egyptians but in judgment on sin itself, including the sin of his own covenant people. What spared Israel was never their ethnic identity or moral superiority; it was the blood of the lamb smeared on the doorframe. The sermon presses this same logic onto other acts of divine judgment (the flood, the destruction of Jericho), arguing that the right question is never "why did God judge them," but "why did God spare anyone at all" — and the answer is always substitutionary blood, never human merit. This grounds a call to total honesty about sin: every hearer stands guilty before a righteous God with no defense, and God's justice, good in itself, becomes an enemy to sinners apart from a substitute.

The Passover lamb, the sermon argues, was only ever a ritual promise pointing to a true and final sacrifice. This is made explicit in the Lord's Supper: when Jesus takes bread and the cup and says "this is my body" and "this is my blood of the covenant, poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins," he identifies himself as the true Lamb of God, the fulfillment of the Passover pattern. Just as Israel's deliverance rested not on their goodness but on blood applied to them, so believers are saved not by their record but by the blood of Christ received by faith.

The sermon then turns to Caiaphas, tracing the office of high priest from Aaron through its politicization under Roman occupation, to show Caiaphas as a man who preserved his eighteen-year tenure by serving Rome rather than God. His stated motive for killing Jesus — to prevent Roman reprisal against the nation — is shown to be selfish and blind, yet Scripture's irony is drawn out sharply through John 11:50, where Caiaphas unknowingly prophesies that "it is better that one man die for the people" than the whole nation perish. The sermon frames this as God's sovereign hand at work through human wickedness: the most corrupt high priest in Israel's history unwittingly offers the final, true sacrifice, and Jesus's own words in John 10 — that no one takes his life, but he lays it down of his own accord — are used to insist that the cross is neither accident nor mere conspiracy but the outworking of the Father's eternal love and decree.

Against this backdrop, the sermon contrasts two responses to the news of Jesus's coming death: Judas and the unnamed woman (identified, via John 12, as Mary of Bethany). Judas, entrusted with the disciples' money and already a habitual thief, voices the loudest objection to Mary's extravagance — pouring perfume worth roughly a year's wages, some 300 denarii, on Jesus — masking greed as concern for the poor before going on to sell Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. Mary, by contrast, alone grasps the weight of Jesus's announced death: as a crucified man cursed under the law (Deuteronomy 21:23), Jesus will receive no honorable burial from Rome, so she preemptively anoints him for burial while he still lives. Jesus defends her: "she has done a beautiful thing to me," recognizing that she alone accords him the burial due a king, even the King of the universe.

The sermon closes with two applications drawn from Mary's example: first, believers are called to "break the jar" of their own lives in costly, undivided devotion to Christ, examining what functions as their own thirty pieces of silver — money, reputation, secret sin — that competes with loving Jesus; second, believers are called to glory not merely in Christ's death but in its humiliation, seeing in the crucified, shamed, and cursed Christ the very place where, as the hymn "Here Is Love" puts it, "heaven's peace and perfect justice kissed a guilty world in love." The cross's shame is not in tension with its glory but is the very shape that glory takes for those under judgment.

Bible Verses Used

• Matthew 26:1-5: Jesus announces his coming crucifixion while Caiaphas and the elders secretly plot to arrest and kill him, framing the whole passage as the deliberate start of the Passion.

• Matthew 26:6-13: The account of the woman (Mary) anointing Jesus with costly perfume, used as the central positive example of costly, discerning devotion contrasted with Judas.

• Matthew 26:14-16: Judas's bargain with the chief priests for thirty pieces of silver, used as the negative counterexample of greed displacing love for Christ.

• Matthew 26:26-29: The institution of the Lord's Supper, cited to show Jesus explicitly identifying himself as the fulfillment of the Passover lamb.

• Exodus (Passover narrative): Retold to establish that substitutionary blood, not personal merit, is what spares anyone from God's righteous judgment.

• John 11:49-50: Caiaphas's unwitting prophecy that one man should die for the people, read as an ironic declaration of the true meaning of the cross.

• John 10:17-18: Jesus's statement that no one takes his life from him but he lays it down of his own accord, used to establish the voluntary, sovereign nature of the atonement.

• John 12:1-8: The parallel account naming the woman as Mary and stating plainly that Judas's objection stemmed from theft, not compassion for the poor.

• Deuteronomy 21:23: The law that one hanged on a tree is cursed, applied typologically to Jesus's crucifixion.