Context No. 2511 of 4322 · Matthew

Matthew 27:6-10: in context

6The chief priests took the pieces of silver and said, “It’s not lawful to put them into the treasury, since it is the price of blood.” 7They took counsel, and bought the potter’s field with them to bury strangers in. 8Therefore that field has been called “The Field of Blood” to this day. 9Then that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled, saying, “They took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him upon whom a price had been set, whom some of the children of Israel priced, 10and they gave them for the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me.”

Judas has thrown the thirty pieces of silver back into the temple, and the chief priests face a small legal problem. It is not lawful, they decide, to put blood money into the treasury. So they scruple carefully over the coins, and use them to buy a potter's field as a burial place for strangers, a plot that came to be called the Field of Blood.

Look at what troubles them and what does not. They are meticulous about a rule, blood money must not enter the temple treasury, while feeling nothing about the fact that it is blood money because they paid to have an innocent man killed. They strain out the technicality and swallow the murder. It is a portrait of a conscience gone lopsided: scrupulous about small proprieties, numb to a great evil it is directly party to. The danger is not unique to them. I can be fastidious about minor rules and religious appearances while quietly complicit in something genuinely wrong.

Am I fussing over small proprieties and appearances while blind or numb to a real wrong I am actually part of?

Sources

Matthew 27:6: It's not lawful to put them into the treasury, since it is the price of blood.
Matthew 27:8: Therefore that field has been called The Field of Blood to this day.
Matthew 23:24: You blind guides, who strain out a gnat, and swallow a camel!