Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 26:56

"But all this is come to pass, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled. Then all the disciples left him, and fled." — Matthew 26:56 (ASV)

But all this was done — A better translation is, 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, but our Lord’s own witness to the disciples and the crowd that the treachery and violence of which He was the victim were all working out a divine purpose and fulfilling the Scriptures in which that purpose had been foreshadowed.

Then all the disciples forsook him, and fled — We read with sorrowful surprise of this cowardly abandonment. Better things, we think, might have been expected from those who had professed their readiness to go with Him to prison and to death. Yet we may remember two things: (1) the weariness and exhaustion that had overcome them, making resolve and courage more difficult, to say the least; and (2) they had been told not to resist, and flight might have seemed to them the only alternative to resistance. We must supplement St. Matthew’s record with the strange episode from Mark 14:51 of the “young man with a linen cloth cast about his naked body” (see the note on that verse).