30 pieces of silver
By: Heber Rowan
Tags: Friends, Relationships, Bible, Friendship, Love

At the moment, silver, the shiny metal of allure is riding high on the international currency markets at currently more than 20€ per ounce.

This got me thinking about the relativity of value and power of price points than can change behaviour.

Photo by Connor Hall on Unsplash

Matthew 26:14–15 (ESV): 14 Then one of the twelve, whose name was Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests 15 and said, “What will you give me if I deliver him over to you?” And they paid him thirty pieces of silver.

30 pieces of silver, in today's money, is just over 600€ at the time of writing. That’s not a lot when you compare it with other income considerations for the time of the biblical story and contemporary inflation. In Ireland, the average industrial wage is over 32,000€ per annum and the needs to make ends meet are so high that 600€ would barely cover a month’s rent for most people in Dublin.

I’m not one to normally ponder over the bible and its teachings as an agnostic. However, there is a lesson within it when we compare the numbers of contemporary life.

In my view, the lesson of the silver is that the price of anything is relative, that vice can feed a short term gain but lead to long term pain. Judas did kill himself after coming to terms with his betrayal. The silver was used to buy a plot of land in the end by the priests who picked up his discarded silver. The story has given rise to the phrase “sold out” to describe friendship cast aside for material gain.

Those 30 pieces of silver, would be weighty in your hand. It would weigh nearly a kilo and provide a sense of reassurance that yes, it really was actually money of a tangible nature. The value of a virtuous friendship or relationship on other hand can’t be physically experienced so easily compared to the bag of silver. It’s something more, something you can’t put a price on. If it’s really good, virtuous without any sense of transactional malice undermining it, then it is worth more. That is why their spiritual dimension to friendship.

Some might even call someone else “worth their weight in gold”, and while that’s a lot. Say for argument’s sake 85kg person would be worth 4.7million Euro, that’s not a lot. As it’s is finite as a figure. The price you could place on someone else’s time, skills and talent are more than you could quantify on a crude assessment of what gold would be worth. As what someone would spend that money on and all of the different things they prefer are relative. What’s more, when they have more money, they are more likely to spend it under the marginal propensity to consume. “I have it, therefore, I spend it” type thing.

Photo by Sabrinna Ringquist on Unsplash

Though if you consider the working life of someone as being roughly 60 years and you factor in the industrial wage for that time. You’d get less than the weight of someone in gold in today’s prices if we go with the Irish average industrial wage that is.

So does that say that gold is eternal and that of some transcendent property? Is that why churches and temples of different faiths are gilded with it?

No, I think that’s overthinking things.

Silver as a whole, while useful in some practical purposes like gold, generally is just defined as valuable because we say it is so. It is always worth as much as people are willing to pay for it. Value is an idea. What is valuable defines societies and economies as a whole.

‘Value is relative’, is an idea posited by those describing the virtues of investing in Bitcoin and other tradable goods defined as valuable by a market. It is hard to grasp that sometimes given the stable perception of major world currencies, the price of grain, or a functioning state that we get so used to we end up forgetting the price it took to get all of those things in the first place.

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” — Oscar Wilde ( The Picture of Dorian Grey)

When we see people complain about the costs of democracy being high. It’s a case of people losing sight of the transcendent value of somethings that really matter. Elections are expensive affairs, political debates on a parliament floor cost money to arrange, run the show etc: yet, they are cheaper than war. Human life is worth more than such costs. As we may often forget, politics is war by other means. So the price of trashing something out with words and ballot papers when we balance it up is more than just the costs of bullets and funerals.

The price of life is unquantifiable. Though the 30 pieces of silver tells us spiritually is, in my view, ‘are we so corruptible that we can be bought for just 30 pieces of silver?’. Additionally, it says, if we fail to value another person’s perspective, their human value, their life; we are losing sight of the intrinsic value of someone else with an arbitrary price. Which means if we see people as means to ends, or means to things rather than ends in themselves. We are in a position where we could be bought for some relative price.

This comes from an idea that ‘money may not equal happiness but it can help’, that even two thousand years ago, everyone had their price a breaking point of their virtue to the vice allure of financial reward. Yet it only struck me recently, when I looked up what would 30 ounces of silver actually be in today’s money. Not a lot.

Relationships are hard, they take work and sometimes they break apart. Though those that go the distance and last, they’d be built on the knowledge of the intrinsic value of each other. Worth more than ‘their weight in gold’. This matters.

The hazard, of course, is that such virtuous relationships in practice require both parties to balance their respect for the other person’s time, effort etc given to the relationship. That all relationships, however strong, have a balance that needs to be maintained so that one (or both) parties don’t fall into thinking that their ends could be met by the nature of friendship. Things are reciprocal when they are based on that openness and mutual respect. It is why relationships that go the distance don’t have people call each other names or generalities like ‘you are a bastard’ etc they say ‘you need to do the dishes’. Behaviours can be changed, people can’t. That is why it is unhelpful to categorise people totally as defined by their behaviours in generalities.

The only one that matters is, does the other person know the value of the person beyond the price of silver and gold, or anything or anyone for that matter. That’s the lesson that bag of silver tells us.