Sold For Thirty Pieces Of Silver

Sold for Thirty Pieces of Silver

The prophet Zechariah described a shepherd rejected by the flock. The shepherd requested pay for services rendered:

I said to them, “If you like, give me my wages, whatever I am worth; but only if you want to.” So they counted out for my wages thirty pieces of silver.

And the LORD said to me, “Throw it to the potter”—this magnificent sum at which they valued me! So I took the thirty coins and threw them to the potter in the Temple of the LORD. (Zechariah 11:12-13)

Matthew practically quoted Zechariah when he recorded events of Jesus’ final week. “Judas . . . went to the leading priests and asked, ‘How much will you pay me to betray Jesus to you?’ And they gave him thirty pieces of silver” (26:14-15). It was an insulting sum—the price of a slave. He had no value as far as they were concerned, no more value than a slave in the marketplace. The chief priests used the thirty pieces of silver Judas eventually threw back at them to buy the potter’s field as a cemetery for foreigners that came to be known as the Field of Blood (27:3-8).

Then Matthew wrote: “This fulfilled the prophecy of Jeremiah that says, ‘They took the thirty pieces of silver—the price at which he was valued by the people of Israel, and purchased the potter’s field, as the LORD directed’” (Matthew 27:9-10). Since there is no exact quotation in Jeremiah for this, we recognize that Matthew was doing something common in his day—creating a composite quotation of more than one Scripture but referring to only one of its sources by name. He was combining themes and phrases from both Jeremiah 32, where the prophet bought a field near Jerusalem, and Zechariah 11.

Matthew was not suggesting here that what has happened is the fulfillment of actual predictive prophecy, and he was not inventing history to match prophecy. But he was making the point to his Jewish readers that God was at work, even in the tragic events of Jesus’ betrayal and Judas’s death, just as he had been at work in the highly symbolic ministries of the prophets Zechariah and Jeremiah. Matthew was convinced that the key events in salvation history all happened under the guiding hand of God’s providence.

Precious Jesus, how valuable you are, and yet you were betrayed for such a paltry sum. If you could entrust yourself to the justice of God when betrayed and belittled so unjustly, you can empower me to do likewise.