Prophecies and Pottery

“And they weighed out as my wages thirty pieces of silver. Then the Lord said to me, ‘Throw it to the potter’—the lordly price at which I was priced by them. So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the house of the Lord, to the potter.” – Zechariah 11:12-13

The book of Zechariah, set after the Israelites’ return from exile, reads like a “wild ride” full of non-linear narrative and startling imagery (see Read Scripture video). The first eight chapters are a series of nighttime visions set in a chiastic structure; the last six are a series of Messianic visions. In fact, about 54 passages from Zechariah are echoed in about 67 different places in the New Testament, with the majority of those found in Revelation.

One prophecy I had never caught before occurs in this enacted parable in chapter 11. Zechariah becomes a shepherd who is rejected by his peers and paid out by sheep traders who plan to slaughter the flock. It’s a tragic story with a startling detail: Zechariah gets paid thirty pieces of silver to leave, the same amount that Judas got paid to betray Jesus. Lay this passage out next to Matthew 26-27, and other similarities emerge: there is haggling over the price (Zechariah 11:12, Matthew 26:15), an attempt to return the money by casting it into God’s house (Zechariah 11:13, Matthew 27:5), and ultimately the money’s use towards the potter (Zechariah 11:13, Matthew 27:7).

What is all this about the silver and the potter? Thirty pieces of silver was the amount paid if a slave was gored by an ox (Exodus 21:32)—it was what a slave, a damaged piece of goods, was worth. Zechariah speaks of it as a “lordly price” in sarcasm. A potter’s field was an area where clay was extracted, or a dump for broken shards of pottery—either way, it was cheap land. Zechariah experienced through this story what Jesus did: coming as the true shepherd who loves his sheep, only to be rejected and devalued. 

Ironically, Jesus was gored, by the nails and the spear. He died priced as a slave, his life worth only enough to buy a chunk of cheap land. Zechariah breaks his staffs of Favor and Union in this first parable only to take up the “equipment of a foolish shepherd” in the next, a shepherd who destroys and devours the sheep (Zechariah 11:15-17). We all follow some kind of shepherd. The question is which one: the shepherd who brings a favor and union that leads to life, or the one whose end is destruction?