What Does Matthew 27:50 Mean?

(50) **When he had cried again with a loud voice.**—It is well that we should remember what the words were which immediately preceded the last death cry; the “It is finished” of John 19:30, the “Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit” of Luke 23:46, expressing as they did, the fulness of peace and trust, the sense of a completed work. It was seldom that crucifixion, as a punishment, ended so rapidly as it did here, and those who have discussed, what is hardly perhaps a fit subject for discussion, the physical causes of our Lord’s death, have ascribed it accordingly, especially in connection with the fact recorded in John 19:34, and with the “loud cry,” indicating the pangs of an intolerable anguish, to a rupture of the vessels of the heart. Simple exhaustion as the consequence of the long vigil, the agony in the garden, the mocking and the scourging, would be, perhaps, almost as natural an explanation. **Yielded up the ghost.**—Better, *yielded up His spirit.* All four Evangelists agree in using this or some like expression, instead of the simpler form, “He died.” It is as though they dwelt on the act as, in some sense, voluntary, and connected it with the words in which He had commended His spirit to the Father (Luke 23:46).