The veil of the temple was rent in twain. — Better, the veil of the sanctuary, or, if we do not alter the word, we must remember that it is the veil that divided the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies that is here meant. The fact, which the high priests would naturally have wished to conceal, and which in the nature of the case could not have been seen by any but the sons of Aaron, may have been reported by the “great multitude of the priests” who “became obedient to the faith” (Acts 6:7). The Evangelist’s record of it is all the more significant, as he does not notice, and apparently, therefore, did not apprehend, the symbolic import of the fact. That import we learn indirectly from the Epistle to the Hebrews. The priests had, as far as they had power, destroyed the true Temple (comp. John 2:19); but in doing so they had robbed their own sanctuary of all that made it holy. The true veil, as that which shrouded the Divine Glory from the eyes of men, was His own flesh, and through that He had passed, as the Forerunner of all who trusted in Him, into the sanctuary not made with hands, eternal in the heavens (Hebrews 10:20-21). All who fulfilled that condition might enter into that holiest place, but the visible sanctuary was now made common and unclean, and there too all might enter without profanation.
The earth did quake, and the rocks rent. — Jerusalem was, it will be remembered, situated in the zone of earthquakes, and one very memorable convulsion is recorded or alluded to in the Old Testament (Isaiah 24:19; Amos 1:1; Zechariah 14:5). Here, though the shock startled men at the time, there was no widespread ruin such as would lead to its being chronicled by contemporary historians.