And the LORD said to me, “Throw it to the potter”—the handsome price at which they valued me! So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them to the potter at the house of the LORD. – Zechariah 11:13

Today’s Scripture Reading (July 26, 2017): Zechariah 11

I am a bargain hunter. Okay, not really. I hate shopping (unless it is for books – it is dangerous to leave me in a used bookstore for very long.) I don’t hunt for bargains. Maybe I am just cheap. I don’t easily part with my money.

It is the tension of modern society. We want to pay the least for things that we consume while being paid the most for the jobs that we do. When you stop to think about that, it is counter intuitive. We can’t have it both ways. And if we are honest, we most often feel that the reverse is what is true in our lives. We pay the top price for the things that we buy while receiving only the least that someone can possibly give us as our wage for the things that we do. As a result, we never feel that we can ever get ahead financially.

There is sarcasm in this passage that we miss. The “handsome price” of thirty pieces of silver was the minimum price at which a human life could be valued. Zechariah is not proud of the price that was paid – it simply could not have been any lower. Thirty pieces of silver was the price of a slave. It was the least that could be paid for a human life. The phrase “thirty pieces of silver” catches our imaginations. As Christians, we see in this passage in Zechariah the story of Judas betrayal of Jesus. Jesus was sold for the minimum price. The God of the Heavens and the Earth was sold for the price of a slave.

The apostle Matthew appears to quote from this passage, except that he doesn’t name Zechariah, but instead says that it is from the prophet Jeremiah. “Then what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled: ‘They took the thirty pieces of silver, the price set on him by the people of Israel, and they used them to buy the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me’ (Matthew 27:9-10). Scholars have argued for three possible answers to the discrepancy. Maybe this is a copyist error, and at some point, someone who copied the original document of Matthew accidentally substituted Jeremiah for Zechariah. Or it is possible that Zechariah was quoting an unknown teaching of Jeremiah as he tells this story (Zechariah prophesied approximately sixty-five years after Jeremiah). But what makes the most sense is that the book of Zechariah was originally included in the scroll of Jeremiah. So Matthew essentially acknowledges the major author of the scroll on which the prophecy is found, even though the quote came from Zechariah.

But whatever the reason for the discrepancy, we are left with the uncomfortable truth that the price that was paid for Jesus was the absolute minimum. We struck a bargain – and it is a bargain of which I hope that we are not proud.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Zechariah 12 & 13