Zechariah 11:12
I told them, “If you think it best, give me my pay; but if not, keep it.” So they paid me thirty pieces of silver. (NIV)
Today’s Reading: Zechariah 11:10-14 and Matthew 27:1-10
Zechariah will no longer be the shepherd because the flock detested his presence. So he tells his employers to pay him if they think he deserves to be paid. So they paid him thirty pieces of silver.
In verse 13, God calls this a “handsome price” which is sarcasm at its best. We should all pause here in defense of all of us who tend to be a bit sarcastic and note that God uses sarcasm to make a point. It was sarcasm because thirty pieces of silver was the price of a slave prescribed by God to Moses and Jesus was worth way more than that:
“If the bull gores a male or female slave [to death], the owner must pay thirty shekels of silver to the master of the slave, and the bull is to be stoned to death” (Ex 21:32).
Zechariah’s prophecy clearly was fulfilled by Judas Iscariot when he betrayed Jesus. There are certain prophecies that simply amaze me by their detail like this one. Even though God foretold exactly how something would unfold, it didn’t affect the future event. You’d think the elders would have paid Judas a different amount in order to not fulfill this prophecy. Yet they in fact paid him exactly 30 pieces of silver:
“Then Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve disciples, 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. From that time on, Judas began looking for an opportunity to betray Jesus” (Matt 26:14-16, NLT).
I personally think the elders needed the price for Jesus to be thirty pieces of silver. The insult of being purchased for only thirty pieces of silver was too rich for them to pass up. They rejected Jesus as the Messiah anyway so in their minds they weren’t fulfilling any prophecies. However, the prophecy that Matthew cites is a bit of a mash-up of multiple prophecies so it’s not as black and white as he makes it seem.
Matthew 27:3-10 records the second interaction between Judas and the chief priests and elders. Judas tries to return the money and undo what he started which would lead to Jesus’s crucifixion. The chief priests refused to take back the money so Judas threw the thirty pieces of silver into the temple and then hanged himself. Then Matthew writes:
“The leading priests picked up the coins. ‘It wouldn’t be right to put this money in the Temple treasury,” they said, “since it was payment for murder.’ After some discussion they finally decided to buy the potter’s field, and they made it into a cemetery for foreigners. That is why the field is still called the Field of Blood. 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’” (Matt 27:6-10, NLT).
The first confusing part of this is that Matthew cites Jeremiah. There are centuries of debate and discussion around this point. I’ll sum it up by simply saying that this was for two reasons. First, Matthew doesn’t quote any prophecy word for word. Part of Matthew’s citation does reference Jeremiah who had a couple of dealings with potters (Jer 18 & 19) and bought a field (Jer 32) but Jeremiah doesn’t say anything about thirty pieces of silver. That amount comes from Zechariah.
Second, they didn’t have printing presses in first century Middle East. Everything was hand-written on scrolls. The scroll of the prophets began with Jeremiah’s writings. Within that scroll were the other prophets writings such as Zechariah because. They would put as much into one scroll as possible to avoid having tiny scrolls to maintain. Thus, Matthew would’ve referenced the prophets as a whole by using Jeremiah since all the prophets were in Jeremiah’s scroll. It’s the same as if we only cite the main author of a book even though there might be a couple of other contributing authors that are less popular.
We will dig into all these prophecies a bit more tomorrow when we cover Zechariah 11:13. But for today, the point of Matthew citing the prophecy is to draw us to those sections of Scripture. Jesus was sold for thirty pieces of silver – the price of a slave. He was also sold for an amount equal to the value of a potter’s field – only seventeen pieces of silver in Jeremiah 32:9 which is much less than the value of a slave.
Matthew writes in his citation of prophecy that all this happened “as the Lord directed”. Jesus came to earth to show Israel how much he loved them. He knew he would be rejected, betrayed and ultimately sold like a slave to be crucified. It all happened just as the Lord directed. The irony is that these events showed us that Jesus loves us so much more than his words could express. This was always the plan to redeem us from sin. The intricate details that were foretold simply emphasize to us that this was in fact the plan all along.
Christ in the Old Testament 
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