Jesus evidently gave this prediction before He and His disciples left the upper room (cf. Luke 21:31-38; John 13:36-38). Matthew and Mark probably placed it where they did in their Gospels to stress the gravity of the disciples' defection and Peter's denial.1007Matthew presented Jesus as knowing exactly what lay ahead of Him. He was not a victim of fate, but He deliberately approached His death as a willing sacrifice and prepared His disciples carefully for the trauma of that event.
26:31 "Then"(Gr. tote) here expresses a logical rather than a temporal connection with what precedes. Jesus emphasized that the disciples would desert Him very soon, that very night. They would find Him to be a source of stumbling (Gr. skandalon, cf. 11:6). Jesus' arrest would trip them up, and they would temporarily stop following Him faithfully. They still did not understand that the Messiah must die. By quoting Zechariah 13:7 freely Jesus was telling them again that He would die and that their scattering from Him was something within God's sovereign plan. This did not excuse their failure, but it prepared them for it and particularly helped them recover after it.
In Zechariah 13:1-6 the prophet spoke of a day when, because of prevailing apostasy, the Shepherd would be cut down and His followers would scatter. The sheep in the prophecy are the Jews many of whom would depart from the Shepherd but a third of whom would remain. The disciples constituted the core of this remnant that Zechariah predicted God would bless in the future (Zech. 13:7-9).
26:32 Jesus here assured the disciples that He would meet them in Galilee after His resurrection. Following as it does the announcement of their abandoning Him, this promise assured them that He would not abandon them. He would precede them to Galilee where He would be waiting for them when they arrived (cf. John 21).
26:33-35 Peter was ready to suffer martyrdom with Jesus, but he was unprepared for Jesus' voluntary self-sacrifice. Despite Peter's claim Jesus explained that his defection was just hours away. The crowing of cocks signals the morning. Peter refused to accept the possibility of his denying Jesus. The language he used, the rare subjunctive of the Greek verb dei("I must"), may imply that he really did not think Jesus was going to die.1008
