10-11 And I took my staff Favour, and I broke it, annulling the covenant that I had made with all the peoples. So it was annulled on that day, and the sheep traders, who were watching me, knew that it was the word of the Lord. 12-13 Then I said to them, “If it seems good to you, give me my wages; but if not, keep them.” 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. 14 Then I broke my second staff Union, annulling the brotherhood between Judah and Israel.

15-16 Then the Lord said to me, “Take once more the equipment of a foolish shepherd. For behold, I am raising up in the land a shepherd who does not care for those being destroyed, or seek the young or heal the maimed or nourish the healthy, but devours the flesh of the fat ones, tearing off even their hoofs. 17 “Woe to my worthless shepherd, who deserts the flock! May the sword strike his arm and his right eye! Let his arm be wholly withered, his right eye utterly blinded!” Zechariah 11:10-17 English Standard Version.

This is part of the section where the prophet Zechariah was acting out a visual parable to the people who had resettled in the land after returning from a long exile. Sadly, it seems they were going back to the bad old days that had resulted in God having to punish the nation. Zechariah now spoke of God's covenant with the people being broken, and the other sheep traders realized he was bringing a message from God. But rather than putting great value on God's word, what do verses 12-13 suggest?

In Old Testament law, thirty shekels of silver was the price the owner of an ox which had gored someone's slave had to pay to the owner of that slave. The implication is that they didn't place much value on Zechariah or his ministry. The result was that he then broke the second of his two shepherd's staffs, signifying division amongst the people. But worse was to come. God says that He was going to raise up a worthless shepherd who would care nothing for the sheep. This likely refers to a ruler that would come on the scene. The words of vs 17 will sound severe in our ears, but they show how terrible in God's eyes are those who were meant to care for His people, but who neglected them and did them harm.

Now while I can't see or explain everything in detail in Zechariah's visual parable, I certainly see some parallels to the life of Jesus. After the disciple named Judas had betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver to the false shepherds of Israel who wanted to kill Him, we read that “when he saw that Jesus was condemned, he changed his mind and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, saying, 'I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.' They said, 'What is that to us? See to it yourself.' And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed, and went and hanged himself. But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, 'It's not lawful to put them into the treasury, since it is blood money.' So they took counsel and bought with them the potter's field as a burial place for strangers.” (Matthew 27:3-7) The little value the shepherds of his day put on the ministry of Zechariah is surely a picture of the little value that the shepherds of Israel would put on Christ many years later.

The other truth that Zechariah's parable surely pointed to was the difference between the worthless shepherds who abounded when Jesus came to Jerusalem, and how Jesus Himself is the good shepherd that God's people need. A wise preacher I heard recently said that when we read the Bible, we mustn’t make it all about ourself. We must read it to hear what God has spoken, especially what it tells us about Jesus. That's very true. But it's not wrong to then also think about how we ought to respond to what we've read. And in today's reading my response would be “what value do I put upon Christ? Do I realize that He brought God's message to us, and that He is the good shepherd who cared so much for God’s sheep that He laid down His life for them?” Can I sing the hymn, and truly mean it, which says: “Take my life and let it be - consecrated, Lord, to Thee”?