Sermon: The Stone the Builders Rejected

     Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24                 Acts 4:8-12

Today I want to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus with you by exploring this text: The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.

For some of you the main association you have with that phrase might be the song Cornerstone. So I looked it up. It’s a song that celebrates a kind of personal sense of security that faith might give you in bad times.

My hope is built on nothing less

than Jesus blood and righteousness…

In every stormy gale

my anchor holds within the veil

His oath, His covenant, His blood
Support me in the ‘whelming flood
When all around my soul gives way
He then is all my hope and stay

It’s about individual comfort – and that’s not a bad thing. But what strikes me is how far this use of that song is from how Jesus and the NT writers use that text. For them it is a story of revolution and community. The song on the other hand seems to come from a very individualised imagination, from a place where the status quo in the world is imagined to be unchangeable. And when the world is unchangeable, it’s all about me and Jesus.

We live in a world where it’s really hard to think of faith and salvation as anything other than a kind of personal private matter. But today we are faced with a building project.

The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.

Is this all just a matter of youthful idealism and optimism? Let’s hold that question…

It’s a kind of meme in the bible. It first turns up in one of the texts of the lectionary set down for today – Psalm 118. The Psalmist, it seems, is one of the many scapegoats we looked at in our reflection on I thirst and it is finished, especially when we looked at Isaiah’s suffering servant. The Psalmist, rejected by the builders, is in the end, vindicated by the God of Israel. Psalm, 118, is a song of triumph. Much like the words, Christ is Risen. The scapegoat is vindicated … and then… and then becomes a cornerstone. The old building project has mutated into a new building project. It’s a revolutionary meme.

But I am struck by the image that is introduced here – a building site. God is building a human community, a people, a life together.

The meme pops up again in the gospels (Matthew and Mark). There Jesus, in the business of fulfilling scripture (bringing it to its goal, its completion, as we talked about a few weeks ago). And the context is his struggle with the Chief priests and the religious leaders. So he takes up this image of a building site just after he has told a brutal parable about them… about a vineyard, about a landlord who goes away and sends messengers, who like the prophets of the past, are killed by those in charge (the builders). Jesus is very clear. Those who purport to represent God. The religious leaders are those who are destroying God’s building project.  

Jesus identifies with the prophets, he expects to be killed, he expects to be the scapegoat of the unstable powerful. And like the prophets he holds out hope for a different kind of building, a different kind of life together. He has hope for a kind of divine building project that no-one, not the religious leaders, not even his own disciples could imagine. So taking on the religious leaders meant taking on the political consciousness of a whole nation.

The wonderful Pentecostal theologian Chris Green writes this:

“Jesus’ life ended as it did, not because the powers of evil overcame him, still less because God forced it to happen for the sake of accomplishing a predetermined plan. No, Jesus’ life ended as it did because ordinary human beings, including the faithful and loving and hopeful ones, could not imagine an alternative to the injustice they found themselves enacting”

(Chris Green)

Enacting injustice … failing to imagine… Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Do we too fail to imagine an alternative to the injustice that we find yourself enacting in the current world?

To those with no imagination Jesus cried out ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they are doing?’ They are letting this insane system continue to do what it does, killing people like me every day. But they can’t imagine an alternative to the injustice they are finding themselves enacting. They do not know what they are doing.

To those who ‘do not know what they are doing’, Jesus submits. It is his passion (passio means to suffer). He has spent his life enacting the way of his Father, building the Kingdom of God, active in a divine building project. Now is the time to be acted upon, to submit. To submit to his Father’s will is to submit to the violent processes that swirl around him. It is only as he refuses to respond in kind, as he submits to what they are doing, as God raises him to vindicate this submission, that those who do not know what they are doing have any hope of discovering the truth and the depth of what they are doing. Only thus will it come to light.

The building project seems like a very active thing, and it is, but bound up with that, enclosed within it is a kind of passivity, a submission, a suffering. In a world built on violence, redemption will involve suffering. Active peacemaking. Suffering peacemaking.

So did the Father answer the prayer of Jesus for the forgiveness of the builders? Yes! That’s what the resurrection is – God forgiving. To give Jesus back to them in peace is to forgive them. You cannot hold God down, you cannot destroy God’s building project. Their great No to God became, in the resurrection just another yes of God to them… another step towards the opening up of their imagination to participate in God’s life, in God’s building life together.

So is the resurrection of Jesus a call to political action? Yes and No. It’s all about the cornerstone. Its all a question of what political action? Indeed what is politics in the first place. To put it another way. What does building life-together look like if the life that God is building has Jesus’ own life as the ‘cornerstone’ of a common future. If it means being crucified rather than resorting to the sword, what does that look like politically. If it means loving your enemies, what does that look like politically?

We come back to that earlier question. Is this just a matter of youthful optimism and idealism?

When Peter and John are dragged before a great array of political and religious leaders… the high priest, the captain of the temple, rulers, elders scribes and tells them to their face that they killed God’s agent and then announces again “the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. Is that naivety in the extreme? Is it naïve in a political context dependent on the military and crucifixion and warfare and hierarchy? Is it naïve in a world where suffering must be avoided at all costs? Is it naïve in a world where crimes must be punished rather than forgiven?

Sure…. You could say it’s naïve in any world where the building project is our building project alone. It’s naïve in any political situation where the politics is our work and not God’s work. In that world it’s insane.

But that’s not Peter’s imagination… Peter is speaking to the leaders because God has raised Jesus. God’s politics is re-established. God has raised Jesus, and God is ensuring that he remains present and active in a new kind of community, a new kind of politics and a new kind of suffering.

Thanks be to God.