Innocent Blood – Matthew 27:1-10

Single mom, Nancy Simpson, tells how her 10 year old son received training at school for how to respond during a tornado. He had been taught to seek shelter in the lowest part of the building and that the safest place was in the southwest corner of that building. When shortly after there was a real tornado alert that wakened them in their home and she and her son began making their way to the basement, her son mentioned the southwest corner and looking at his mom said, “You take that one.” He didn’t realize they could share it. He was willing to sacrifice himself for his mom.

Innocent blood and noble. That’s what Judas betrayed when he helped the leaders of his people arrest Jesus.

When morning came, all the chief priests and the elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death. And they bound him and led him away and delivered him over to Pilate the governor.

Then when Judas, his betrayer, 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 he went and hanged himself. But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, “It is 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. Therefore that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken by the prophet Jeremiah, saying, “And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him on whom a price had been set by some of the sons of Israel, and they gave them for the potter’s field, as the Lord directed me.” (Matthew 27:1-10 ESV)

The leaders of Israel will have nothing short of death for Jesus, but they need Rome’s permission for this, so they take him to Pontius Pilate who is stationed in Jerusalem hoping to get a death-penalty imposed.  Judas seems not to have bargained for this and pangs of guilt move him to divest himself of the pieces of silver and his guilt, but the priests won’t release him from either.  They are not doing their jobs as priests and Judas’ guilt is too great.  The only sacrifice that could cover his guilt is that of the one he betrayed.

In Acts 1 it sounds as if Peter thinks Judas purchased the Potters Field with the silver, but what he means is that the silver used by the priests to purchase the field made it as if Judas had purchased it.  Peter says in Acts that Judas fell and burst open, the consequence it would seem of his body hanging to death and bursting open afterwards.  Jeremiah had predicted the day in which this area of Jerusalem would be a place where Israel’s inhabitants buried those who died during a siege on Jerusalem, something that had already occurred but to which Judas’ death gave further evidence of its cursed nature.

You might say that we are just like Judas. We have betrayed innocent blood, our sin being the cause of Jesus, the innocent one, needing to go to the cross to die in our place. We have vainly tried to erase our guilt by doing what is right, but there is no help in that. The only forgiveness has come as we received it in faith as a gift from a loving Father through the merits of Jesus’ death and resurrection.