Zechariah 11:12-13 – Then I said to them, ‘If it is agreeable to you, give me my wages; and if not, refrain.’ So they weighed out for my wages thirty pieces of silver. And the LORD said to me, ‘Throw it to the potter’ – that princely price they set on me. So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the house of the LORD for the potter.
The context of Zechariah 11 is one of divine judgment through a process of withdrawal. God instructs Zechariah to act as a shepherd to the flock doomed to slaughter, a picture of Israel under corrupt leadership and divine abandonment. Zechariah takes up the shepherd’s staff, tends the flock, and then offers the people a choice: pay my wages, or do not. Their response reveals their true estimation of the shepherd-figure: thirty pieces of silver.
Thirty pieces of silver was the price stipulated in the Mosaic law as compensation for a slave gored by an ox (Exodus 21:32). It was not a price of honour or a price worthy of a prophet. Neither was it a price worthy of the Son of God.
When the religious leaders negotiated with Judas Iscariot, they settled on the same amount: And they counted out to him thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26:15). The price the leaders of Israel placed on Jesus was the exact price their forefathers had placed on the rejected shepherd in Zechariah’s oracle: the price of a slave.
When Judas, overcome with remorse, tried to return the money to the chief priests and elders, they refused to accept it back. Judas threw the coins down in the temple, and the religious leaders used the money to purchase the potter’s field as a burial place for strangers (Matthew 27:3-7). Matthew quotes Zechariah: And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the value of Him who was priced, whom they of the children of Israel priced, and gave them for the potter’s field, as the LORD directed me (Matthew 27:9-10).
The Good Shepherd was rejected, valued at a slave’s price, and betrayed, and yet through that betrayal, the purposes of God were accomplished. Jesus Himself said: The Son of Man indeed goes just as it is written of Him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! (Matthew 26:24). The betrayal was foreknown and foretold. God was not caught off guard by Judas. The cross was not plan B.
John 10 shows us that the Good Shepherd does not abandon His sheep when danger comes; He knows them and is known by them, and He lays down His life for the sheep willingly, freely, lovingly. The rejected shepherd of Zechariah becomes, in Jesus, the self-giving shepherd who absorbs the rejection, bears the contempt, and transforms the instruments of His betrayal into the means of the world’s salvation.
The thirty pieces of silver also speak to us about the danger of allowing price to determine value. The chief priests knew Jesus. They had seen His miracles, heard His teaching, felt the authority of His words. And they valued Him at thirty pieces of silver. Judas had sat at His table, heard His prayer, witnessed His compassion, and settled on thirty pieces of silver as His worth. The question Zechariah’s oracle poses to every generation is the same: What do you value Jesus at? Is He the treasure for which you sell everything else (Matthew 13:44-46)? Or is He priced at something disposable?
We who have been purchased not with silver or gold but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot (1 Peter 1:19), know His true worth. Thirty pieces of silver were the world’s valuation. The empty tomb is God’s answer to that valuation. The risen Christ, ascended and exalted, is the Father’s declaration: this One is worth everything.
What is Jesus’ worth to you?
Ask God to:
- Forgive us for the times we have valued comfort, convenience, or reputation above loyalty to Christ.
- Make us shepherds of the vulnerable, the lost, and the outcast; people who lay down our own comfort for the sake of others.
