33 “Hear another parable. There was a master of a house who
planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and
built a tower and leased it to tenants, and went into another country. 34 When
the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants [3] to the tenants to get
his fruit. 35 And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another,
and stoned another. 36 Again he sent other servants, more than the first. And
they did the same to them. 37 Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They
will respect my son.’ 38 But when the tenants saw the son, they said to
themselves, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.’
39 And they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. 40 When
therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”
41 They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and let
out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their
seasons.”
42 Jesus said to
them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures:
“‘The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone; [4]
this was the Lord's doing,
and it is marvelous in our eyes’?
43 Therefore I tell
you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people
producing its fruits. 44 And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to
pieces; and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.” [5]
45 When the chief
priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was
speaking about them. 46 And although they were seeking to arrest him, they
feared the crowds, because they held him to be a prophet. (Matthew 21:33-46
(ESV)
“The stone that the builders rejected has become the
cornerstone, this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”
Jesus Christ, set for the fall and rising of many, the
stumbling stone that breaks to pieces those who fall on him, and crushes those
upon whom he falls, this Jesus Christ is the stone that the builders rejected,
the stone retrieved from the rejects, resurrected from the rubble of failed
plans and projects where it had been buried to become the cornerstone of God’s
temple built upon the foundation of prophets and the apostles. The builders
reject him, and God builds his temple upon him. It is as true today as it was
then.
Then it was a matter of the leaders of Israel, these elders
and chief priests upset at Jesus for turning tables and driving out animals,
for cleansing the temple to be a house of prayer rather than a den of robbers. They
challenge his authority to do these things, they are intent to get rid of him.
They reject him so he rejects them. They reject him because he is a challenge
to their prestige, to their plans, to their efforts to build righteousness in
their lives and the lives of others.
These people were respected, and morally upright. They were
men who had what Paul has talked about as confidence in the flesh. What is meant
by that? Paul starts listing sins of the flesh here. All sins are sins of the
flesh. Paul here talks about the things most would consider good, and not to be
sin at all. All his life he strove to do everything just right. His parents
sent him to all the right schools. Oh, Paul knew what it meant to stumble on
this rock of Jesus Christ and be broken to pieces, to have this cornerstone
fall upon him and be crushed. Everything by which he thought he had standing
before God to be counted righteous, everything that gave him confidence in his
flesh was lost in his encounter with Christ. Everything by which he thought he
was better off than others, thrown away like skubala, the type of rubbish dogs
leave for you to clean up in the yard. But it was in this skubala, this rubbish
of human endeavor by which these men planned to build the temple of God, the
kingdom of God. And for this reason they rejected Christ. For Christ would not
allow them to have their righteousness, if they were to have his. You can’t
enter the house, the kingdom of God with skubala, you have to scrape it off
your shoes, or better yet, as God tells Moses at the burning bush, take them
off, leave them outside for this is holy ground. Their own sense of
righteousness led them to kill Jesus, just as Paul’s zeal led him to persecute
the church. For to accept the forgiveness of Christ is to count all your
efforts at righteousness to be of the same value as dog droppings in the back
yard. That is what we learn from Paul.
And it isn’t just the Pharisees that have a problem with
this. To this day people try to find some place for themselves, for their flesh
even in the Christian faith. And when confronted with the reality that even our
good works need forgiveness, the response is, then why should I even bother? The
response reveals the hollowness of the flesh and its confidence, the hypocrisy
of the righteousness. Why bother? Love that’s why bother. But that is what we
miss. And it is precisely why Jesus needed to die, so that when our hate killed
him, his love could shower us in grace and kill our hate, drown our old Adam.
That finally out of it all, there in the midst of the rubbish pile the
cornerstone resurrected we could stop trying to build ourselves, and be built
in Christ, each one of us a living stone hewn and shaped by the work of God,
roughed over by his mercy, shaped by his grace, polished by his unfailing love
and patience and fitted together into the temple of God, laid on the foundation
of the prophets and apostles, and shaped by the cornerstone that is Christ.
Now the piece of God that surpasses all understanding keep
your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.
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