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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
This image depicting Matthew 26:14-16 is by French painter and illustrator James Jacques Tissot (1836-1902), rendered in opaque watercolor over graphite on gray wove paper, owned by the Brooklyn Museum, and used from this site. You might note Judas’s raised fingers’ negotiating his fee. The unidentified suspicious figure in the foreground apparently is a device used by the artist in part to draw your attention to the proceedings on the left.
What price or value would you put on a human life? The question seems like a horrible one to ask, reminiscent of our nation’s past history of slavery. Our present industrialized nations may not buy and sell people as slaves anymore, but yet, in many ways, prices or values are nevertheless put on human lives all the time: others do it, and so do we. For example, economists estimate what is called the “value of a statistical life”, the value individuals place on changing their likelihood of death. Health‑insurance plan‑administrators evaluate marginal costs spent in comparison to marginal benefits received. And, even we might do something such as consider the impact having a child would have on our lives, in terms of how we spend our time and money. Tonight’s second sermon in a series of eight with the general theme “Passion Prophecies fulfilled for you!” has as its more‑specific theme: “Sold for 30 pieces of silver that bought the potter’s field”. As we proceed, we will realize not only the value that the Jews put on Jesus’s life but also the value that He put on our lives.
St. Matthew’s divinely‑inspired Gospel account alone tells us about Judas Iscariot’s negotiating with the chief priests the price of thirty pieces of silver for his betraying Jesus to them (Matthew 26:14-16), how that money was later used, and of its fulfilling prophecy (Matthew 27:7-10; confer Acts 1:18-19). St. Matthew refers to prophecy of Jeremiah (perhaps Jeremiah 18:2-12; 19:1‑13; 32:6-9), but Matthew seems to be using a shorthand that includes prophecy and action recorded by Zechariah (Zechariah 11:12-13). French painter and illustrator James Jacques Tissot’s depiction of Judas’s negotiations with the chief priests is reproduced on the front of tonight’s service outline, but no artist’s depiction can do justice to all the context and details of the Gospel account. For example, thirty pieces of silver was the value that Exodus records for the owner of an ox to pay the owner of a slave who was killed by the ox (Exodus 21:32). How do you picture that? Similarly, in Zechariah, thirty pieces of silver come up in connection with people’s severing their relationship with their shepherd. How do you picture that? In New Testament times, the thirty pieces of silver apparently equaled 120 denarii, which might be the pay to a laborer for 120 days of work. How do you picture that?
Want to know what thirty pieces of silver is worth today? Well, as you might expect, there is an app for that! The app says 30 shekels of silver (or 11 troy ounces) today is worth about $220 (not even four eight‑hour days of work at minimum wage). Surely you and I would put a higher price or value on Jesus, would we not? We understand the keeping of the Ten Commandments to flow out of our relationship to God: we should fear love and trust in God above all things, and our fear and love of God in turn should lead us to love our fellow human beings. If we look at how we fail to keep the Ten Commandments, then perhaps we could conclude that we put a low price or little value on Jesus. Likewise, we at times put equally low or lower prices or values on the lives of our fellow human beings and maybe even on ourselves.
In our five Midweek Lenten Vespers Services, we are using five of the seven so‑called “Penitential Psalms”. At least a few verses from tonight’s Psalm (Psalm 32) may have been familiar to you: its opening two verses were quoted in Sunday’s Epistle Reading (Romans 4:1-8, 13‑17), and the second half of verse 5 has long been a part of one of the options for the preparatory part of the liturgy for the Divine Service, what people often think of as confession and absolution. Indeed, He wants us to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust Him to forgive our sin, and to want to do better than keep on sinning. So, we confess our sins to the Lord, and He forgives us. When the Lord covers our sin—when he does not count them against us—then we are truly blessed.
Judas looked for an opportunity to betray Jesus and found one, as we tonight heard narrated in “The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ” read as “Drawn from the Four Gospel [accounts]”. Matthew tells us that when Judas saw that Jesus was condemned, Judas changed his mind and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, confessing his sin. They did not forgive him on God’s behalf but told him to see to his sin himself. Judas threw down the pieces of silver into the temple, as apparently Zechariah had done, and, instead of trusting God to forgive Him for Jesus’s sake, Judas went and hanged himself. (The Jewish leaders used the money to buy the potter’s field as a burial place for strangers, and it was called the Field of Blood.) Jesus, the true Good Shepherd, Who had been rejected, the faithful High Priest, in keeping with all the prophecies of the passion, went to the cross and died for Judas’s sin, for your sin, and for my sin. The Office Hymn we sang tonight, a hymn-text likely “new” to us but set to what should have been a familiar tune, put the matter this way:
All that the Father planned, / The Son sought to fulfill,
When first He said, “Lord here am I / To do Your will.”
What costly sacrifice / To cover human sin!
Who but Christ Jesus had the right / To enter in?
His blood, that sprinkled price, / So we might be assured
That our inheritance in light / Has been secured. (Lutheran Service Book 564:1, 4)
A low price and value had been put on Jesus’s life, but He put a high price and value on our lives. As true God in human flesh, Jesus could not have given more than what He gave for us. As we confess in the Small Catechism’s explanation to the Second Article of the Apostolic Creed, Jesus redeemed us lost and condemned people—purchased and won us from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil—not with gold or silver but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death (SC II:4; confer 1 Peter 1:18-19). And, the benefits of that act of redemption on the cross He gives us through His Word and Sacraments: Baptism, Absolution given individually after private confession, and the Sacrament of the Altar—the very body and blood that redeemed us in with and under ordinary bread and wine. Through His Word in all its forms, Jesus blesses us who repent and believe with the forgiveness of sins and so also with life and salvation. In turn, we bring forth the fruits of our repentance and faith in the form of good works according to the various vocations God has given us.
Economists’ “value of a statistical life” and health-insurance plan-administrators’ value of one year of additional life range anywhere from $50-thousand per year of quality life to an average of $7-million for prime‑aged workers. Reportedly illegalizing any form of slavery, today’s industrial nations’ justice systems consider human life to be, like a MasterCard according to its slogan, priceless. Our considering Jesus’s being sold for thirty pieces of silver that bought the potter’s field as one of the “Passion Prophecies fulfilled for you!” has helped us realize not only the much lower value that the Jews put on Jesus’s life but also the inestimable value that He put on our lives. We may better appreciate that value now, but we will not fully appreciate it until we spend eternity with Him. God will grant that eternal appreciation, for Jesus’s sake.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +