CRITICAL NOTES.
Zechariah 11:12. Good] “He served them, not for wages, but in obedience to the Divine will.” Wages, however, were due; the price of a slave offered.
Zechariah 11:13.] It was contemptuously rejected. Jehovah regards the wages offered to himself. Goodly] Noble price, ironical. Potter] As worthless.
Zechariah 11:14.] Worse evil threatened than the former. Second, utter breaking up of the nation, and loss of fraternal unity.
THE SHEPHERD’S PRICE.—Zechariah 11:12-14
The prophet, representing Jehovah, demands the price for his services. The Jews were God’s peculiar people, blessed above all others, and should have made grateful return. But they offered forms for sincerity, added injury to insult, and sold the Messiah for thirty pieces of silver.
I. A price of their own rating. “If ye think good, give me my price; and if not, forbear.” As their servant, he sought their love and obedience. He will not force, but leave it to free-will. If men withhold what is due, God will not constrain them to give. His goodness should bind us to love him. “Love sought is good, but given unsought is better” [Shakespeare].
II. A price most contemptible. “They weighed, for my price, thirty pieces of silver.” They gave him the price of a bond-servant, half the value of a free-man—the compensation for a slave that had been killed (Exodus 21:32; Matthew 26:15). “A goodly price”—a splendid value that has been set upon me! Good men are not half valued in the world. What wonder when Christ, the Son of God, was sold so cheaply!
III. A price rejected by the Shepherd. “Cast it unto the potter.” The most suitable person to whom to cast the despicable sum, who plies his trade in the valley of polluted clay (2 Kings 23:10). An action significant of the mind of God, and the doom of the people. God values our smallest service if offered in sincerity, but contempt of his Son will meet with death.
IV. A price which brought Jehovah’s displeasure upon them. “Then I cut asunder mine other Staff” (Zechariah 11:14). The shameful payment by the people leads to the abandonment to their fate. Fraternal unity is dissolved, and the nation is broken up into self-destroying parties. When schisms rend the Church, and factions break the peace of a people, we may see the withdrawal of the Shepherd’s care, and the presage of the nation’s doom. “When the staff of Beauty is broken the staff of Bands will not hold long. An unchurched people will soon be an undone people.”
HOMILETIC HINTS AND SUGGESTIONS
Zechariah 11:12. If ye think good. The demand an appeal to men, to give them opportunity of reasoning, explaining their conduct, and appreciating God’s kindness.
1. God lays men under great obligation by his love; makes them indebted to him.
2. Men should make some return to God. Not because they enrich God, but as proof of their affection.
3. God seeks return. “Give me my price.” He will not enforce it, but leave the consequences with men.
“Thus saith the Lord God, He that heareth let him hear, and he that forbeareth let him forbear.”
Zechariah 11:13 (cf. Matthew 27:3-10). There are points of diversity between the two transactions—that in the Prophet, and that in the Evangelist. There are points, too, of similarity; and in these the allusive type is to be considered as lying. The “price”—reward or hire—given to the prophet, in the vision, represented the slight value set upon his person and official services. So did the same price, put upon the head of a greater than Zechariah or any of the prophets, testify the low value they set upon him and his Divinely-attested ministrations and work. The identity of “the price;” the principle, or want of principle, shown in its pitiful diminutiveness; and the giving of each to “the potter,” are the chief points of resemblance, in which the treatment of the prophet was a prophetic prefiguration of the treatment of him “of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did write.” However indirect and obscure the prefiguration might be, we are not to regard the reference by Matthew as a mere accommodation. There was in what befell the prophet a designed foreshadowing of what in the future should befall the prophet’s Lord [Wardlaw].
House. They are his most guilty adversaries who, like the Jews in Jesus’ days on earth, and like apostate Christians in our days, are so “in the house of the Lord” [Fausset].
Zechariah 11:14. Cut. God seems to say that he will now no more govern this people in mildness and clemency, nor yet exercise his shepherdly severity in saving corrections and visitations, as formerly he had done; but utterly reject and disject them [Trapp].
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 11
Zechariah 11:12-13. Price. The influence of money on a man will be according to the man’s state of mind; according to the condition of his heart and affections, his estimate and plan of life [Binney].
Zechariah 11:14. Brotherhood. Let us keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Let this soft and silken knot of love tie our hearts together: though our heads and apprehensions cannot meet, as indeed they never will, but always stand at some distance off from one another [Cadworth].