Sarcasm, Zechariah 11, and the deity of Christ

When I was a Freshman in Bible school I was often reprimanded for being sarcastic. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough for me to remember. It was one of the more difficult things to try to overcome in my character because I can be an extremely sarcastic person. Sarcasm isn’t always bad, but to use it always is bad. It’s also very bad to use it to against another person, in a hurtful way. But sarcasm isn’t always bad. Sometimes it’s really good. It can be quite the stress reliever, actually. My mom is a professional sarcastic. She works with some people that are consistently doing things wrong and in order to keep from getting angry she throws in a sarcastic comment, also known as a smart remark, and then she laughs and goes on fixing what must be fixed. I could be a professional sarcastic, but I am trying to not be because I don’t want to take mom’s job. But I know I run in a close second.

Anyway, I was reading in Zechariah 11 this morning and saw a few things that I found quite interesting. First, I saw that God can be sarcastic. In this chapter, Zechariah was told by God to go and get a job as a shepherd, one of those great symbolical acts common of prophets during that era. I’ll not discuss the majority of the meaning behind this act, simply because I haven’t studied it out and thus do not know the meaning. But there area few things I’ll mention.

In one month of working as a shepherd Zechariah fired three other shepherds because they were evil and the four of them weren’t really working well together. Not long after that Zechariah ended up quitting. He had been shepherding a flock of sheep that were intentionally being fattened just so that they could be killed. In the process of quitting he cut up a staff, which he’d called Favor, showing that the Favor of God was no longer on the flock of sheep or on those shepherding it. The other shepherds understood the symbolism of Zechariah’s actions and weren’t in a hurry to stop him from quitting. When Zechariah quit he told them that they could either give him his wages or not, that it didn’t matter to him, and that they had to do what they thought was best. They paid him 30 shekels of silver (sound like a familiar price). This payment was meant as an insult, not as a payment. It would have been less insulting to receive nothing, I believe, because this amount of money was the amount that was paid in the purchase of a slave.

After all of that happened, God spoke to Zechariah. “Then the LORD said to me, ‘Throw it to the potter, that magnificent price at which I was valued by them.’ So I took the thirty shekels of silver and threw them to the potter in the house of the LORD.” (Zech. 11:13, NASB). Everything that I have to say has to do with this verse alone. So, we’ll start with the first part of the verse, where God says, “that magnificent price”. This is sarcasm! God was sarcastic!! I love it. I just felt like pointing out to the world (of Sarah’s blog) that God was sarcastic.

The second thing that I found interesting is a bit more serious. In the same verse you see a foreshadowing or prophecy of Christ. Judas, Jesus’ disciple, was paid to betray Jesus. He was paid thirty shekels of silver. When Judas realized what he’d done, after Jesus was arrested, he felt sorry and brought the silver back to the Pharisees. They used that money to buy a potter’s field. So, it is extremely obvious that this Zechariah passage is one of those Messianic prophecies. But not only is it a Messianic Prophecy, but it’s also a clear statement that Jesus is God. God said, “…that magnificent price at which I was valued by them.” “They” are the Pharisees, the evil shepherds. The price paid was actually paid for Jesus, whom God refers to as himself.

I love how God makes that stuff so clear. I’d have to say, He knew what He was doing…but then, that should be obvious simply because He is God and knows everything anyway.