At dawn the chief priests and elders take counsel again to put Jesus to death, and they bind him and hand him over to Pilate (verses 1-2). Judas's confession comes in the gap between the council's verdict and Rome's. When Judas sees that Jesus is condemned, he changes his mind and brings back the thirty pieces of silver, the sum the law set as payment for a slave gored by an ox (Exodus 21:32). One of the clearest verdicts on the innocence of Jesus comes from the man who sold him. He goes back to the men he made the deal with and names the truth aloud, at cost to himself and with nothing left to gain.
The chief priests and elders answer 4"What is that to us? See to it yourself." Priests offered sacrifices for sin, and a man who comes naming a specific sin is handed back to himself. Then they find a scruple: 6"It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since it is blood money." They will not let the coins touch the temple's accounts, though they used the same coins to buy a man's death. They can spot uncleanness in silver and miss it in their own hands.
Judas took his sorrow to the priests, and he did not take it to Jesus. He named his sin accurately and publicly, and his grief never turned toward the one he had sinned against to ask for mercy. Only hours earlier Peter had grieved just as bitterly, and Peter's tears sent him back toward the Lord he had betrayed (Matthew 26:75). Judas 5"throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple," went away and hanged himself. His grief had nowhere to go but inward.
The priests use the money to buy the potter's field as a burial place for strangers (verse 7), a show of legal correctness bought with silver they knew was stained. The money paid for a betrayal becomes a resting place for people who belong nowhere, and Matthew does not comment on the irony. The field receives a lasting name, 8"the Field of Blood." Matthew sees a prophet's words fulfilled, with the thirty pieces of silver given for the potter's field. He names Jeremiah, and the picture also draws on Zechariah's shepherd valued at thirty pieces of silver (Zechariah 11:12-13). The Scriptures had been waiting for a scene like this one.
Judas said something truer than he knew. The blood he betrayed was innocent, and its innocence is what lets it do what no other blood could. Judas tried to settle his account with a rope, the self-atoning instinct of every guilty conscience. No one can absorb their own guilt that way. The innocent blood Judas named is the only blood that was ever going to be enough for any guilty conscience.
When guilt weighs on you, ask where you are taking it. Take it to Jesus, whose blood is the one thing sufficient for it.
Prayer
Father, we have known the weight of real guilt without always knowing where to take it. Forgive us for the times our sorrow over sin has turned inward. Thank you that Christ's blood was innocent and sufficient, for the betrayal Judas named and for the kind we are all capable of. Where we feel the sting of our failures, turn our regret into repentance that runs toward mercy. In Jesus' name, amen.