Bought and Sold For $21.62
The Amplified Bible in 1958 translated thirty pieces of silver as $21.62. [1]
“The didrachma and tetradrachma (actually stater) are references to silver coins from the city of Tyre, used in the business of the Temple. The staters were equal to shekels, and because the Jews were forbidden to issue their own silver coins, they were forced to use coins from this merchant city. Ironically, the coins bore the image of Israel's old nemesis, Baal. Money-changers were on hand to render service, changing foreign currency into these Tyrian coins for a percentage. Judas was paid with thirty staters.”[2]
Inherent within our own self-perceived constructs of good and evil, the analogy of smelting metal to form coins, nails and a spear transforms instead of purity, the tools to commit murder. The process, an ancient one, where all impurities, by being held over intense heat, making the metal itself formable and cleansed. Our souls were unable to do the same until the brutal murder of Jesus Christ. For underlying those thirty pieces of silver, was the price paid for the lowest of slaves. Those worth only for the most back breaking work and their cheap cost, insured easy replacement. Thus, as the shift in perception changes, every lash, scourging, thorns and nails, our malignant impurities were exposed onto the body of the Son of God.
The view of His life reduced in man’s eyes in a rapid motion as little consequence, the redemption giving leave to the call for mockery in derision for life beyond death. Their notion and belief of the political threat, overturning the governing power was swept away as a mere sale of a slave of the lowest order. The result, the exchange for Barabbas became the effortless choice from the faith of a carpenter fulfilling the Old Testament. Those thirty pieces of silver betraying the Cup, we became part of and caught in our own capability and capacity to embrace evil, the most poignant and pronounced in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Though purifying metals for the greater good and evil therein, we, by the detachment of demanding immunity, paid little heed to the consequences of our culpability to murder. We annihilated the conscience to reprieve ourselves of foul deeds done in full conscious. The separation from the soul eases the quickening to the Devil's dance and the gleeful choice negating the responsibility for life, bought the smooth talk, unaware of the quicksand on the next footstep.
He absorbed the full extent of the foul and despicable to present to ourselves the ease in which we condone its tenets. Though we pay little heed to our own endorsement for murder, the reprieve was granted, even in the death, we demanded as our right to do so. For we return our ill-gotten behaviors in free will, irreparable choices condemning the open narrow path given in the blood of the covenant. Yet, the reach was to us to find our courage in our self-demand perdition and to pull ourselves out by the eternal strength in the thread of eternal hope, the gift we throw back in His face. Yet within our shroud of culpability, a flicker of light rouses the fragile and still whisper in our seeming futility of seeing in a far off memory the remembrance of the nobility and integrity housed in virtue. Sight unblended sees not the molding of flour and water, but the slaughtered lamb fighting again to reclaim our damaged souls. In this we struggle up on feeble and disused feet seeking to find that the peace I give you is the certainty of faith.
truthmagazine.com/archives/volume35/GOT035341.html
[2] Coins of the Bible Stan Hudson https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/1980/07/coins-of-the-bible
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An odd influence for a writer perhaps, yet it became the starting point, ‘The Grasshopper and the Ants. I was five, my mother was teaching me how to read from McGuffey’s First Reader; I have the whole collection by the by. It was then she also read me that Aesop’s tale, I remember asking how is he the bad guy when he gave the gift of playing his music for free. The query was met with a puzzlement, so I stayed on the path of the Grasshopper, still convinced he is the real hero of the story.
As with writers, the gift is given and if not applied to benefit in love, that same gift is ill-used and rescinded. Such is the honor required to write and to seek the truth however impalpable it may be. This lead to not only writing the history of my own parish of Saint John’s, but searching the Catholic history of North America, for volume one of two, ‘Our Tenacity of Faith.’
The journey has and is not without its times of difficulty, yet one carries on because that is the job, to write and to write well.
