The Thirty Pieces of Silver
On this page
Scripture: Zechariah 10–11 (with Matthew 27:3–10 and John 10:1–18)
Before this session, read Zechariah 10–11: the LORD’s anger at the false shepherds and His promise to gather and redeem His scattered flock, the strange acted parable in which the good Shepherd shepherds the flock destined for slaughter and breaks His two staffs, the weighing out of His price at thirty pieces of silver thrown to the potter at the temple of the LORD (11:12–13), and the rise of the worthless shepherd who devours the flock. Then read Matthew 27:3–10, where Judas flings down the thirty pieces in the temple and they are used to buy the potter’s field. Keep your Bible open, and ask: what does it mean that the price of the Shepherd, and the use of the money, were foretold to the coin five hundred years before the betrayer counted it out?
So they weighed out my payment … thirty pieces of silver. … So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them to the potter at the temple of the LORD.
(Zechariah 11:12–13)
The Flock and the Shepherds
These two chapters belong to the great theme that gathers up the close of Zechariah and runs straight into the Passion: the theme of the Shepherd and the sheep. Israel was the LORD’s flock, and a flock must have a shepherd; and the tragedy that runs through the prophets is that the shepherds set over the flock (the kings, the priests, the leaders) had failed it again and again, fleecing and scattering the sheep instead of feeding them. Zechariah opens this section with exactly that complaint: the people set out like sheep and become scattered because they have no shepherd (10:2). There was no one to lead them, no one to feed them, no one to gather them; they wandered like sheep harried and scattered on the hills.
The picture of God’s people as a flock, and their leaders as shepherds, runs all through the Scriptures, and it carries both the tenderest comfort and the sharpest rebuke. On the one hand, The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing: the most beloved of all the psalms rests on it. On the other, the prophets turn the image into an indictment, none more fiercely than Ezekiel, who heard the LORD denounce the shepherds of Israel that fed themselves and not the flock: You eat the fat … but you do not feed the sheep! You have not strengthened the weak, healed the sick, … or sought the lost. And in the same breath Ezekiel heard the remedy: Look, I myself will search for my sheep and seek them out … I will set one shepherd over them … namely, my servant David. Zechariah stands squarely in this tradition. The failure of the under-shepherds is the dark backdrop against which the LORD promises to come and shepherd His flock Himself, through the one Shepherd, the Son of David, whom Ezekiel had foreseen.
And the LORD’s response is twofold, and it sets the pattern for everything that follows. On the one hand, His anger burns against the false shepherds: I am enraged at the shepherds and will punish the lead-goats (10:3). The men who should have cared for the flock and instead devoured it will answer for it. But on the other hand, and in the same breath, the LORD declares that He will not leave His flock shepherdless: For the LORD who rules over all has brought blessing to his flock, the house of Judah. The Hebrew verb is the rich word for visiting, for coming to attend to and care for. Where the human shepherds have failed, the LORD Himself will come and shepherd His people. This is the hope held out all through the prophets and fulfilled at last when the Good Shepherd came in person, and it is held in tension, all through these chapters, with the dark mystery that this same Shepherd, when He came, would be rejected and sold by the very flock He came to save.
There is a moment in the Gospels that reads like the answer to Zechariah’s complaint. The Lord Jesus, going about the towns and villages, looked on the crowds, and when he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were bewildered and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd (Matthew 9:36). The very condition Zechariah names, a flock troubled and scattered because it has no shepherd, is what moved the heart of the Good Shepherd when at last He came among them. He saw the harried sheep, fleeced by their leaders, untaught, unhealed, wandering, and His compassion went out to them. This is the heart of God toward His scattered people in every age: not indifference, not contempt, but the compassion of a shepherd who cannot bear to see the flock perish for want of care. And it is the more astonishing, then, that the flock He pitied would be the flock that sold Him; the compassion did not waver even when the sheep turned upon the Shepherd.
The Cornerstone and the Peg
Before the darkness, there is a burst of light: a promise of the LORD’s gathering and redeeming of His scattered people. I … will strengthen the kingdom of Judah and deliver the people of Joseph and will bring them back because of my compassion for them … for I am the LORD their God and therefore I will hear them (10:6). And the LORD says He will signal for His scattered sheep (the Hebrew word is to whistle, as a shepherd whistles for his flock) and gather them home: I will signal for them and gather them, for I have already redeemed them … Thus I will strengthen them by my power, and they will walk about in my name (10:8, 12). This is the Good Shepherd’s own work, that He would describe in His own words: the sheep that hear His voice, whom He calls by name and leads out, who follow Him because they know His voice. The gathering Zechariah promises is not a political restoration of an earthly nation but the calling home of the redeemed flock: the one flock the Lord Jesus spoke of, gathered from Judah and Joseph and from the far nations into a single fold under a single Shepherd.
We should be careful here, for these gathering-texts are a favorite of those who read the prophets as a forecast of a restored earthly nation. But notice what the gathering actually is. The LORD whistles for His scattered sheep and brings them home from Egypt and Assyria, from the far countries where they were dispersed; and the point is not the redrawing of a map but the redemption of a people: I have already redeemed them. When the Good Shepherd came, He read the promise exactly this way, speaking not of national borders but of sheep who hear His voice, and of a flock to be gathered from far beyond the old fold. The regathering of Zechariah 10 is fulfilled wherever the Shepherd’s voice calls a lost sheep home (from Judah and Joseph, yes, but also from the nations) into the one flock of the redeemed. It is the gathering of the Church, the calling home of the scattered children of God from every land, under one Shepherd and into one fold.
And tucked into this promise are titles that may point to the One through whom the gathering comes. From him will come the cornerstone, the wall peg, the battle bow, and every ruler (10:4). Out of Judah, that is, comes the cornerstone; the wall peg, the great peg driven into a sure place on which all the weight of the house may hang; and the battle bow, the strength for the conflict. These are quiet words, and ancient Jewish interpreters already heard in them the coming ruler. The cornerstone calls to mind the stone the builders would reject, which became the chief cornerstone on which the whole household of God is built. The peg calls to mind the sure fastening of which Isaiah had spoken, a peg fixed in a firm place, on which is hung all the glory and the burden of the father’s house. The text does not require us to read every one of these titles as a direct prophecy of Christ, but read canonically they fittingly direct us to Him: from Judah, from the tribe of the failed kings, the LORD would bring forth the true foundation and the sure support, the Lord Jesus, on whom the whole weight of our salvation hangs and holds.
These two images repay a closer look, for the Scriptures take up each of them. The cornerstone was the stone laid first and lowest, setting the line and bearing the weight of the whole building; and the psalmist had sung, The stone which the builders discarded has become the cornerstone (Psalm 118:22). That text the New Testament applies directly to the Lord Jesus: He is the stone refused by the builders of Israel and made by God the cornerstone of His whole house, the tested and precious foundation Isaiah promised, on which whoever believes will never be put to shame. And the peg was the strong stake driven into a sure place, on which the weight and the vessels of a household were hung; Isaiah had used the image of one given the key of the house of David: I will fasten him like a peg into a solid place (Isaiah 22:23), bearing all the glory of his father’s family. The peg is not quoted of Christ in the New Testament, but it can serve as a fitting picture of Him. Both images say the same thing: the LORD has provided, out of Judah, a sure and immovable support, on whom the whole weight of His house, and of our salvation, may safely hang.
Shepherd the Flock Destined for Slaughter
Then the LORD gives Zechariah a strange and painful thing to act out, a parable performed rather than merely spoken. The LORD my God says this: “Shepherd the flock set aside for slaughter” (11:4); the Hebrew reads, literally, “the flock of slaughter.” The prophet is to play the part of the shepherd, taking charge of a flock marked for slaughter: a flock whose own buyers and sellers have no pity on it, and of which it is said, Their own shepherds have no compassion for them (11:5). He takes two shepherd’s staffs and gives them names: one he calls Pleasantness (older versions have Beauty, or Favor), standing for the LORD’s gracious covenant with the people; the other he calls Binders (older versions have Bands), standing for the union and brotherhood that held the people together (11:7). With these two staffs the shepherd takes up the care of the doomed flock.
This acting-out of a message was a thing the prophets were often called to do, for the LORD taught His people through the eye as well as the ear. Hosea was told to marry a faithless wife, that his marriage might become a living sermon on the LORD’s wounded love. Jeremiah wore a wooden yoke through the streets to picture the coming bondage. Ezekiel lay on his side and cooked his bread over dung to act out the siege. The prophet’s own life and actions became the message, pressed into the people’s memory by being seen. So here Zechariah is told not merely to speak of a shepherd but to be one, to take up actual staffs and to play out, in the sight of the people, the drama of the Shepherd and His doomed flock. And because it is acted, it is the more vivid and the more terrible when, in the acting, the Shepherd is rejected and weighed out at a slave’s price.
But the shepherding goes terribly. Next I eradicated the three shepherds in one month, for I ran out of patience with them and, indeed, they detested me as well (11:8). The relationship breaks down on both sides: the shepherd grows weary of the thankless flock, and the flock loathes the shepherd. And so, in grief and judgment, he takes the staff called Pleasantness and breaks it: Then I took my staff “Pleasantness” and cut it in two to annul my covenant that I had made with all the people (11:10). The breaking of the staff is the breaking off of favor, a fearful acted sign that a people may reject their shepherd so persistently that the gracious covenant itself is, for a time, set aside. Here, in living parable, is the rejection of the Good Shepherd by His own flock, the very thing John would write of the Lord Jesus: He came to what was his own, but his own people did not receive him (John 1:11). The Shepherd comes to shepherd the flock destined for slaughter, and the flock will not have Him.
Thirty Pieces of Silver
And now comes the most precise and astonishing thing in the whole book. The rejected shepherd turns to the flock and asks, almost with a kind of weary irony, what they think He is worth. Then I said to them, “If it seems good to you, pay me my wages, but if not, forget it.” So they weighed out my payment … thirty pieces of silver (11:12). They name His value, and the value they name is an insult. For thirty pieces of silver was a fixed and familiar sum in Israel: it was the compensation set in the law of Moses for a slave gored to death by an ox, the price of a dead slave. That is what they reckoned their shepherd to be worth: not a king’s ransom, not even a free man’s wage, but the going rate for a slave killed by a beast. The flock weighs out for its shepherd the price of a corpse.
We should feel the full insult of the sum. In the law of Moses, where the LORD had set the values of various damages and compensations, one figure stood for the price of a slave gored to death by an ox: If the ox gores a male servant or a female servant, the owner must pay thirty shekels of silver (Exodus 21:32). Thirty pieces of silver was not a generous wage or a respectable valuation; it was the legal compensation owed to the master when his slave, the lowest and least-valued person in the society, had been killed by a beast. It was, quite precisely, the price of a dead slave. And this is the sum the flock weighs out for its Shepherd, the value it sets upon the LORD their God come to shepherd them. They might have named any figure; they named the one figure in all the law that meant: we reckon you the worth of a slave’s corpse. It is the human heart’s estimate of God laid bare: not hatred only, but contempt, the cool and insulting appraisal that values the Maker at the price of a beast-killed slave.
And the LORD’s response drips with holy irony. The LORD then said to me, “Throw to the potter that exorbitant sum at which they valued me!” So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them to the potter at the temple of the LORD (11:13). That exorbitant sum! The words are bitter sarcasm; the Hebrew speaks of the “magnificence” of the price. What a magnificent sum, says the LORD, that you valued Me at; what a princely figure you set on your God and Shepherd. And He commands that this contemptible price be flung to the potter in the very house of the LORD: thrown down in the temple, carried off to a potter. Mark every detail, for every detail will come true: the number, thirty pieces of silver; the metal, silver; the place, the house of the LORD; the destination, the potter. It is one of the most exact predictions in all the Scriptures, and it was written some five centuries before the night it came to pass.
The LORD’s bitter irony, that exorbitant sum at which they valued me, deserves to be heard for what it is. It is not the language of a God surprised or merely wounded; it is the heavy sarcasm of One who sees Himself appraised by His own creatures and names the insult for what it is. “What a handsome sum,” He says in effect, “that you valued Me at.” And the irony has not gone out of date. The world still prices the Lord Jesus cheaply, still weighs Him out against its thirty pieces and finds Him not worth the keeping, still prefers the silver in hand to the Shepherd who offers His life. The old lament asks, Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by on the road? (Lamentations 1:12), and the passing world answers, in effect, that He is worth about the price of a dead slave, a thing to be sold for whatever small advantage the selling brings. Every age sets its own price upon Christ; and the price the world sets is always an insult, and always, in the strange mercy of God, the occasion of redemption.
Thrown to the Potter
We know the night. Then one of the twelve, the one named Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, “What will you give me to betray him into your hands?” So they set out thirty silver coins for him (Matthew 26:14–15). Thirty pieces of silver, the slave’s price, the very sum Zechariah named, was counted into the hand of the betrayer for the Good Shepherd. And when the deed was done and the remorse came too late, Judas brought the money back: So Judas threw the silver coins into the temple and left. Then he went out and hanged himself (27:5). The silver was flung down in the house of the LORD, exactly as Zechariah had said. And the chief priests, scrupulous about the letter of the law even as they had bought innocent blood, would not put the blood money into the treasury, and so, after consulting together they bought the Potter’s Field with it, as a burial place for foreigners (27:7). To the potter the money went, exactly as Zechariah had said.
There is a special bitterness in the fact that the Shepherd was sold by one of His own. Judas was not an outsider but one of the twelve, who had walked with the Lord Jesus, eaten at His table, and been sent out in His name. The psalmist had felt the same wound long before: Even my close friend whom I trusted, he who shared meals with me, has turned against me (Psalm 41:9). It was a friend’s betrayal, a disciple’s kiss, that delivered the Shepherd to the slaughter. And yet, terribly, the betrayal was no accident, nor a failure of the LORD’s plan; it had been written five centuries before, down to the coin. We must hold together two things the Scriptures hold together: that the betrayal served the eternal purpose of God, and that Judas was wholly guilty for it, a free agent who chose his thirty pieces. God foreknew the sin and overruled it for our salvation, but He did not cause it. The Lord Jesus said both in one breath: The Son of Man will go as it is written about him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! (Matthew 26:24). The purpose was God’s; the sin was Judas’s; and the silver went exactly where the prophet had said it would go.
Matthew, recording all this, says: Then what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled: “They took the thirty silver coins, the price of the one whose price had been set by the people of Israel, and they gave them for the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me” (Matthew 27:9–10). An attentive reader will notice that Matthew names Jeremiah, while the clearest verbal parallels come from Zechariah 11:12–13. There is no need to stumble over this. The Evangelist most likely presents a composite prophetic fulfillment, drawing on Jeremiah’s potter’s house and Jeremiah’s purchase of a field, and on Zechariah’s thirty pieces of silver and his potter, and he names the greater and older prophet whose images frame the whole. This does not weaken the fulfillment; it shows how Matthew reads the prophets together, their images fused into the single fulfillment now unfolding before his eyes. The point is not the bookkeeping of the citation but the staggering precision of the thing fulfilled. Five hundred years before, a prophet had been told to act out the rejection of the LORD’s shepherd, to receive a slave’s price of thirty silver pieces, and to fling them to the potter in the temple. And in the week of the Passover in Jerusalem, a man named Judas was paid exactly thirty pieces of silver to betray the Lord Jesus, and on the Friday morning he flung them down in exactly the temple, and saw them spent on exactly a potter’s field. The Good Shepherd was valued at the price of a dead slave, and every detail of His betrayal had been written down five centuries in advance.
And consider what was done with the money, for it too is full of meaning. The chief priests, too scrupulous to put blood money into the temple treasury and not scrupulous enough to repent of having paid it, bought with the thirty pieces a potter’s field, a place to bury foreigners, and it came to be called, the Gospel tells us, the Field of Blood (27:8). So the price of the one death purchased a grave for the many; the blood money of the Shepherd bought a resting place for strangers and foreigners. There is a dark and unintended fitness in it that the priests never saw. The Shepherd’s blood, of which that silver was the price, would indeed purchase a resting place for strangers: for the Gentiles, the strangers and foreigners far off, who by that blood would be brought near and given a place in the household of God. Matthew does not draw this lesson himself, but the potter’s field bought with the betrayal money can serve as a grim little parable of the very thing the betrayal accomplished: by the selling of the Shepherd, a place was bought for the stranger.
But we must not let the precision become merely an argument, impressive as the argument is. The deeper wonder is what the prophecy means. The flock weighed out the price of a corpse for its Shepherd, and the Shepherd took the insult, and went to become the corpse. The contemptible valuation was, in the strange arithmetic of God, bound up with the price of the world’s redemption; the Shepherd reckoned worth no more than a gored slave gave Himself to be slaughtered for the flock that despised Him. The world’s estimate of Christ has not changed much; He is still valued cheaply, still sold for less than nothing by those who prefer their thirty pieces. But the cheapness of the valuation only sets off the infinite worth of what was purchased, for by the death of the Shepherd whom they valued at a slave’s price, the whole flock was bought back from the slaughter.
And here the great reversal of the gospel shines out. They paid silver for Him, thirty contemptible pieces, the price of a corpse; He paid blood for them, the precious blood of the Shepherd, the price of a world. You were ransomed … not by perishable things like silver or gold, but by precious blood like that of an unblemished and spotless lamb, namely Christ, the apostle writes (1 Peter 1:18–19). The flock weighed out cheap silver to be rid of its Shepherd; the Shepherd poured out His own lifeblood to buy the flock back. The two transactions stand forever side by side: the world’s purchase of Christ for thirty pieces, and Christ’s purchase of the world by His death. The first measures the depth of human contempt; the second measures the height of divine love. And the silver they paid is long since spent and gone, while the blood He paid still speaks, and still redeems, and has bought back the whole flock destined for slaughter into a freedom that can never be sold away again.
The Worthless Shepherd
The parable has one more dark turn. The shepherd takes the second staff, the one called Binders, and breaks it too: Then I cut the second staff “Binders” in two in order to annul the covenant of brotherhood between Judah and Israel (11:14). The union of the people unravels once the Shepherd is rejected. And then the LORD tells Zechariah to act out a second and terrible role: Take up once more the equipment of a foolish shepherd (11:15). When the people reject the Good Shepherd, they do not end up with no shepherd; they end up with a worthless one. The foolish shepherd does not seek the scattered, nor heal the injured, nor nourish the flock; he will eat the meat of the fat sheep and tear off their hooves (11:16); he devours the very sheep he was set over. And the LORD pronounces a woe upon him: Woe to the worthless shepherd who abandons the flock! (11:17).
The portrait of the worthless shepherd is drawn from life, and the prophets had drawn it before. Ezekiel had heard the LORD’s long complaint against the shepherds of Israel who fed themselves on the flock (eating the fat, clothing themselves with the wool, slaughtering the choice animals, but neither strengthening the weak nor healing the sick nor seeking the lost) so that the sheep were scattered and became food for every wild beast. The worthless shepherd is the leader who has reversed the whole meaning of the office: instead of giving himself for the flock, he uses the flock to feed himself. He is the opposite, point for point, of the Good Shepherd who lays down His life. And the LORD’s woe upon him is severe, for there is no more dangerous person in the household of God than a false shepherd who wears the shepherd’s garb while devouring the sheep entrusted to his care.
This is a sober word, and it has two edges. It is a warning to every shepherd of God’s people (to pastors and teachers and elders, to all who are given any charge over the flock) for the worthless shepherd is the standing temptation of the office: to feed oneself on the flock rather than feed the flock, to seek the wool and the milk and let the sheep wander and perish. The Lord Jesus would draw the same contrast between the Good Shepherd who lays down His life and the hired hand who, when the wolf comes, abandons the sheep and runs away … Because he is a hired hand and is not concerned about the sheep (John 10:12–13). But the word is also, for the flock, a strange comfort, by contrast. The worthless shepherd shows us by opposition what the Good Shepherd is: the One who does seek the lost, who does heal the broken, who does not flee when the wolf comes but stands and dies for the sheep. Reject Him, and a foolish shepherd is what remains; receive Him, and you are kept by the One who gave Himself for you.
It is worth letting the contrast do its full work of comfort. The hired hand, the Lord Jesus said, sees the wolf coming and abandons the sheep and runs away. When danger comes, the worthless shepherd saves himself and abandons the flock. But the Good Shepherd, when the wolf comes, does not flee; He stands between the wolf and the sheep and dies in their defense. That is the measure of the difference, and it is the measure of our safety. The sheep of the worthless shepherd are abandoned in the hour of danger; the sheep of the Good Shepherd are covered by His own body, kept at the cost of His own life. To belong to this Shepherd is to be kept not by a hired hand who will run, but by the One who proved His care by laying down His life, and who, having died for the flock, will surely not abandon it now.
The Good Shepherd Who Lays Down His Life
It is worth setting beside this acted parable the words the Good Shepherd would speak of Himself, for they unlock its meaning. I am the good shepherd, the Lord Jesus said. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep (John 10:11). And He insisted that the giving was wholly His own free act: No one takes it away from me, but I lay it down of my own free will. I have the authority to lay it down, and I have the authority to take it back again (John 10:18). Read against those words, the strange parable of Zechariah comes clear. The Shepherd was not a victim merely, not a good man overtaken by events, sold and killed against His will. He took the slave’s price knowingly; He set His face toward the slaughter deliberately; He laid down His life for the flock of His own accord. The thirty pieces did not trap Him; He let Himself be sold, because the selling was the road to the cross, and the cross was the road by which the flock destined for slaughter would be bought back. The Good Shepherd was not overpowered. He gave Himself.
And the same Shepherd spoke of the gathering Zechariah had promised. I have other sheep that do not come from this sheepfold. I must bring them too, and they will listen to my voice, so that there will be one flock and one shepherd (John 10:16). The whistling for the scattered sheep, the gathering from Judah and Joseph and the far countries, was never about the borders of an earthly nation; it was about the one flock, drawn from every people under heaven into a single fold under the one Shepherd. And to that flock He gave the most unbreakable of promises: My sheep listen to my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish; no one will snatch them from my hand (John 10:27–28). The flock that once wandered with no shepherd, that loathed its Shepherd and sold Him for a slave’s price, is held now in a hand from which no one can snatch it. The Shepherd who was sold is the Shepherd who keeps. This promise comforts faith; it does not license presumption, for the sheep He keeps are those who hear His voice and follow Him, and He keeps them by that very voice, His Word. Not one of the sheep who listen to His voice will be snatched from His hand.
Gathering the Threads
So these two chapters set before us, in the strange medium of an acted parable, the whole heart of the gospel of the Shepherd. The flock had no shepherd, harried and scattered by men who devoured it; and the LORD declared that He Himself would visit and gather and redeem His flock. Out of Judah He would bring the cornerstone and the peg, the sure foundation and the firm support on whom everything would hang. And then He came in person, the Good Shepherd, to shepherd the very flock destined for slaughter, and the flock loathed Him, and broke the staff of favor, and weighed out for Him the price of a dead slave, and flung the silver to the potter in the house of God.
And all of it is the things concerning Himself. The Good Shepherd of John’s Gospel, who said I lay down my life for the sheep, is the rejected shepherd of Zechariah’s parable; the thirty pieces of silver are the price Judas took; the throwing to the potter is the potter’s field bought with blood money; and the slave’s price set upon the Shepherd is the measure of the world’s contempt for its God. Yet the rejected Shepherd is the redeeming Shepherd, and the very price of His betrayal is bound up with the price of our ransom. He was valued at the cost of a corpse, and He became the corpse, laid down willingly for the sheep who had sold Him, and rose to gather His one flock from every nation under His own hand. The Shepherd was sold for thirty pieces of silver; by His selling, and His slaughter, the flock destined for slaughter was bought back forever. Such was the exorbitant sum at which they valued Him; and such is the worth of what His blood has purchased. The thirty pieces tell us what the world thought the Shepherd was worth; the empty tomb tells us what the Father thought of Him. Between those two estimates every soul must choose, and faith, which the Spirit creates through the Word, clings to the Father’s: that the Shepherd sold for a slave’s price is the Lord of glory, raised from the dead, worth more than all the silver of all the world; and that to be His sheep, known by name and held fast in His hand, is wealth beyond all reckoning.
For Discussion
These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.
The people were scattered because they have no shepherd (10:2), and the LORD’s anger burned against the false shepherds even as He promised to visit His flock Himself (10:3). How does the failure of human shepherds set the stage for the LORD to come and shepherd His people in person?
From him will come the cornerstone, the wall peg (10:4). How are the cornerstone and the firm peg pictures of the Lord Jesus? What does it mean that the whole weight of our salvation hangs on Him as on a peg fastened into a solid place?
The shepherd asks his wages and is weighed out thirty pieces of silver (11:12), the law’s compensation for a dead slave. What does this contemptuous valuation say about the world’s estimate of Christ? How is it still the world’s estimate of Him today?
Every detail came true: the number, the silver, the house of the LORD, the potter (11:13; Matthew 27:5–7). Beyond the apologetic weight of so exact a prophecy, what does it mean that the Shepherd valued at a corpse’s price went and became the corpse, for the flock that despised Him? And why does Matthew name Jeremiah (27:9)?
When the flock rejects the Good Shepherd, it is left with a foolish shepherd who devours it (11:15–17). How does the worthless shepherd show us, by opposition, what the Good Shepherd is (John 10:11–13)? What is the warning here for any who are given charge over God’s people?
The rejected Shepherd is the redeeming Shepherd. How does it deepen your reading of the betrayal to see that the price of Christ’s selling is bound up with the price of our ransom: that by His selling, and His slaughter, the flock destined for slaughter was bought back?
Looking Ahead
We have seen the Shepherd rejected and sold; in the next session, “They Will Look to Me, the One They Have Pierced,” we come to the climax of Zechariah, and to the cross itself. The prophet’s gaze fixes on the One who was pierced, and on a day of mourning when the people of God will look upon Him and weep: they will look to me, the one they have pierced. They will lament for him as one laments for an only son (12:10). He sees a fountain opened to cleanse them from sin and impurity (13:1), and hears the LORD command the sword: Strike the shepherd that the flock may be scattered (13:7), the very word the Lord Jesus quoted on the night He was betrayed, foretelling that His disciples would scatter. And he sees, beyond the piercing and the scattering, the day when the LORD will then be king over all the earth (14:9). The pierced One, the opened fountain, the struck Shepherd, the reigning King: it is the gospel’s deepest matter, and the high point of the most Christological book of the Twelve.
Before the next session, read Zechariah 12–14: the pouring out of a spirit of grace and supplication and the great lament over “me, the one they have pierced” (12:10), the fountain opened to cleanse from sin and impurity (13:1), the sword that strikes the Shepherd so that the flock is scattered (13:7), and the day when the LORD will be king over all the earth (14:9). Then read John 19:31–37, where the soldier’s spear pierces the side of the Lord Jesus and John tells us it fulfilled this word; Matthew 26:31, where He quotes the struck Shepherd; and Revelation 1:7. Ask what it means to look upon the pierced One and mourn, and then to find a fountain opened.
Closing Prayer
O LORD our God, true Shepherd of a scattered and harried flock, we confess that we have wandered like sheep with no shepherd, and worse, that we have joined the flock that loathed its Shepherd and weighed Him out at the price of a slave. We have valued Your Son cheaply, preferring our own thirty pieces to Him who came to feed us. Forgive us; gather us home; and make us hear and follow the voice of the Shepherd who calls us by name.
We bless You for the Good Shepherd, our Lord Jesus, who came to the very flock destined for slaughter, was rejected by His own, and took the contemptible price the world set upon Him, and then went and became the corpse they reckoned Him to be, laying down His life for the sheep who had sold Him. We thank You that the rejected Shepherd is the redeeming Shepherd, and that by His selling and His slaughter we, the flock destined for slaughter, have been bought back forever. Keep us under His hand; make us none of the worthless shepherds who devour, but faithful sheep who know His voice; and gather us at last into the one flock under the one Shepherd; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.