Tradietur filius hominis: The Second Prediction of the Passion and Mary on the Way to the Cross

By Prof. Dr. Daniel C. Afonso · Updated 19 October 2026

Conversantibus autem eis in Galilaea, dixit illis Iesus: Filius hominis tradendus est in manus hominum, et occident eum, et tertia die resurget. Et contristati sunt vehementer.
Mt 17:22-23

Mt 17:22-27 is a double pericope: the second prediction of the Passion (vv. 22-23) and the episode of the Temple tax (vv. 24-27). The second prediction is the briefest of the three in Matthew (cf. Mt 16:21; 20:18-19): “The Son of Man is to be handed over into the hands of men, and they will kill Him, and on the third day He will rise,” without the details about Jerusalem, the elders, and the priests that the third prediction contains. The brevity increases the solemnity: the passage from life to death is stated with an economy of words that gives the announcement a density that is almost unbearable for the disciples.

The reaction of the disciples, “contristati sunt vehementer” (Mt 17:23), is the only reaction of mourning that Matthew records in the face of the predictions of the Passion. The first prediction aroused Peter’s resistance (Mt 16:22). The third will arouse the ambitious request of the sons of Zebedee (Mt 20:20-21). The second, the simplest, simply arouses deep sorrow. The disciples’ sorrow is not wrong; it is a form of understanding: they grasped that something terrible was drawing near, even without yet understanding what the Resurrection means.

I. “Filius hominis tradendus est”: The Handing Over as Vocation

“Tradendus est”: the future passive announces not only what is going to happen but the structure of Jesus’ mission: to be “handed over” (παραδοθήσεται). The verb παραδίδωμι runs through the Passion: Judas hands Jesus over to the priests (Mt 26:16), the priests hand Him over to Pilate (Mt 27:2), Pilate hands Him over to be crucified (Mt 27:26). The “handing over” is the guiding thread of the Passion narrative, and Jesus announces it as part of His mission, not as a historical accident. The “is to be handed over” is not passivity but consent: Jesus knows and accepts what is coming.

The expression “into the hands of men,” “in manus hominum,” is paradoxical: the Son of Man (an expression that evokes Dan 7:13, the being of universal power) handed over to what is human but corrupted: the political and religious power that condemns the just man. The Passion is the confrontation between two humanities, the humanity of Jesus who accepts the handing over and the humanity of the men who wield the power of condemnation. This paradoxical handing over is the heart of soteriology: God in human form submitting Himself to human power in order to redeem humanity from within.

The episode of the Temple tax (Mt 17:24-27) that follows creates an illuminating contrast: Jesus, about to be “handed over” to human power, discusses whether He should pay the tax to the Temple, and concludes that the “sons” are “free” but pays so as not to give scandal. Jesus’ interior freedom before the tax contrasts with the exterior handing over that the Passion will represent: free within, handed over without, the structure of the love that gives itself without being forced.

II. “Contristati sunt vehementer”: Prophetic Sorrow

“And they were deeply saddened” (Mt 17:23): the sorrow of the disciples in the face of the second prediction is one of the most human emotions in the Gospels. They heard, they understood in part, and partial understanding, knowing that something terrible is drawing near without knowing exactly what, is more disturbing than complete ignorance. Sorrow without full understanding is the sorrow of the faith that waits for what it has not yet seen.

The disciples’ sorrow is “prophetic” in the sense that it anticipates the mourning of the Passion: the “deep sorrow” of Gethsemane (Mt 26:37-38: “my soul is sorrowful even unto death”), the flight of the disciples after the arrest (Mt 26:56), Peter’s weeping after the denial (Mt 26:75). The sorrow of Mt 17:23 is the first echo of a chain of sorrows that will culminate at the tomb, and that will be dissolved by the Resurrection which the prediction already announces.

III. Mary and the Second Prediction: “She Kept It in Her Heart”

Mary is not mentioned in the second prediction of the Passion in Matthew, but her presence is implicit in Lk 2:19, 51: “Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.” From the Presentation in the Temple (Simeon’s prophecy about the “sword,” Lk 2:35) to the wedding at Cana (where the “hour” had not yet come, Jn 2:4), Mary had been gathering the signs of what her Son’s destiny would entail. The predictions of the Passion were not for Mary an absolute novelty; they were the progressive clarification of something she had intuited since the Annunciation.

The spirituality of “keeping in the heart” that Luke attributes to Mary is the spirituality of lectio divina: to ruminate on the Word, to let it come down from intellectual memory into the heart that acts. Mary, who heard the predictions of the Passion, directly or through the disciples, did not react with Peter’s resistance nor with the ambition of the sons of Zebedee: she “kept” them in silence, letting the Word make its way to the total availability of Calvary.

The “deep sorrow” of the disciples in the face of the prediction has its Marian analogue in Simeon’s “sword” (Lk 2:35) that pierces the soul. But Mary’s sorrow differs: she “keeps” in faith what she does not understand, without turning it into resistance. The prophecy of the Passion that the disciples receive with a paralyzing sorrow, Mary receives with a sorrow that does not prevent availability, the fiat renewed at each prediction, at each step toward Calvary.

IV. “Et tertia die resurget”: The Horizon of the Resurrection

The second prediction of the Passion includes, like the first and the third, the reference to the Resurrection: “on the third day He will rise” (Mt 17:23). The disciples did not hear this part, or they heard it without understanding it. But the structure of the prediction is not only an announcement of death: it is an announcement of death-and-resurrection. The horizon of the Passion is Easter. The deep sorrow of the disciples is the sorrow of those who heard only the first part and could not integrate the second.

Mary, whom tradition identifies as the first to contemplate the Risen One (John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater 26), lived the “third day” as the confirmation of the faith that had sustained Holy Saturday. But before the third day there was the way, the via crucis that the second prediction announces. Mary on the way of the Passion is the figure of the Church that accompanies the steps of the Lord, knowing that the third day will come but without knowing “when.”

The devotion to the “Way of the Cross” that the Marian tradition developed, from the Seven Sorrows of Mary to the Stabat Mater, has its root in the predictions of the Passion that Mary “kept in her heart”: each prediction is a station of the way, each “contristati sunt” of the disciples has its Marian echo in the soul that receives the sword without breaking. The second prediction of Mt 17 is, in Marian meditation, the moment in which Mary clearly knows what is drawing near and goes on walking, with the Son, toward the Son, in the name of us all.