But all this was done. — Better, but all this has come to pass. The words, though they agree in form with those of Mark 1:22, are, as we see from Mark 14:49, not a comment of the Evangelist’s, but our Lord’s own witness to the disciples and the multitude, that the treachery and violence of which He was the victim were all working out a divine purpose, and (as in Matthew 26:54) fulfilling the Scriptures in which that purpose had been shadowed forth.
Then all the disciples forsook him, and fled. — We read with a sorrowful surprise of this cowardly abandonment. Better things, we think, might have been expected of those who had professed their readiness to go with Him to prison and to death. Yet we may remember (1) the weariness and exhaustion which had overcome them, making the resolve and courage, to say the least, more difficult; and (2) that they had been told not to resist, and that flight might seem to them the only alternative to resistance. We have to fill up St. Matthew’s record with the strange episode of the “young man with a linen cloth cast about his naked body” of Mark 14:51, where see Note.