In the song Blood Money, Judas approaches the high priests about helping them arrest Jesus. After Judas whines for a while about how conflicted he is by all this, this dialog ensues:
Priests:
Your help in this matter won’t go unrewarded
We’ll pay you in silver - cash on the nail.
We just need to know where the soldiers can find him
With no crowd around him
Then we can’t fail.
Judas:
I don’t want your blood money!
Caiaphas:
Oh, that doesn’t matter - our expenses are good.
My question is about Caiaphas’ last line. What does this mean? I can’t make sense of it using any meaning of “expenses” that I’m familiar with. I’ve always kind of vaguely interpreted it as meaning “don’t worry, we have plenty of money to pay you”, but that doesn’t really seem to be the meaning, nor is it an appropriate response to Judas’ statement that he doesn’t want the money. So what’s the real meaning?
But as Jesus said about prideful priests like Caiaphas, “everyone who boasts before God will be taught a lesson; those who approach God humbly are the ones to whom he listens.”
A modern corrupt politician would enter such a payment in his ledger (no matter which side he was on) as something like “services rendered”. Caiaphas suggests some similar legalistic sleight of hand: Call it “expenses” not “blood money”.
“There were a lot of drugs in the late 60s” was the explanation I always went with for a lot of the lines in JCS
I think it’s supposed to show a disconnect between the ways that Judas and Caiaphas & Annas are looking at the situation and the transaction.
And at that point - they think he’s in it for the reward money/bounty. It’s after he refuses it twice, they change tactics about how & why he should take the money.
I always just thought of it as the church viewing the killing of Jesus simply as a business transaction, and saying they could readily afford it. Sorta like they were expensing it out of petty cash.
When I saw the title, I thought it was going to ask about a jaded faded mandarin!
