Wednesday of Holy Week: The Forgotten Day
Wednesday barely gets a mention in most Easter services.
No palms. No supper. No crowds. Just silence.
But it’s not really silent. Because on this day - quietly, in the city - Judas has gone to the chief priests and struck a deal. Thirty pieces of silver.
Most of us hear that and think: tragic. Shocking. And we move on.
But I want to show you something that stopped me in my tracks.
Five hundred years before Judas was born, the prophet Zechariah described this moment. Not vaguely - specifically. The amount. The coins thrown back. The potter. The temple. It’s all there in Zechariah 11:12-13, and it’s all exactly what Matthew 27 tells us happened.
The precision is breathtaking.
God knew every detail. He knew the name of the man who would betray his Son. He knew the price. He knew where the coins would end up. And he wrote it down five centuries in advance.
But read the wider context of Zechariah 11 and you find something even more striking. It’s the story of a shepherd who is rejected by the flock he was sent to tend. He carries a staff called “union” - representing the bond between God and his people. And when the deal is made, that staff is broken.
Judas doesn’t just close a door on Jesus. He breaks a bond.
And yet - Psalm 41, the psalm Jesus himself quotes when he speaks of his betrayer, doesn’t end in bitterness. It ends in praise. Praise be to the Lord. Even in the middle of betrayal, the last word belongs to God.
Wednesday brings two honest questions worth sitting with today.
First: Is there a door that was closed on you? A betrayal. A broken trust. A relationship that ended and still stings? The psalm Jesus quoted ends in praise, not bitterness. There is a way through.
Second: Is there a door you have closed on someone else - or perhaps on God himself?
Wednesday is the forgotten day. But it might be the most honest day of the week for some of us.
Here is the remarkable thing. Jesus knew what Judas was doing. He knew. And he still washed his feet. He still went to the garden. He still went to the cross.
No closed door could stop what he had come to do.
Tomorrow is Maundy Thursday - and we arrive at one of the most beautiful and layered pictures in the whole of Scripture. The Last Supper was a Passover meal, and the original Passover was quite literally all about a door. Blood on the doorframe. The destroyer passing over.
And Jesus picks up that meal and says: I am the blood. I am the door.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
Rob
This is part of the Holy Week Doors series - a daily devotional walking through Easter week. Subscribe to catch every episode.
Read this week’s devotionals here - https://open.substack.com/pub/battledrilldevotional/p/a-different-kind-of-holy-week-starting?r=643q6o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true