“Fall on the Stone, or Be Crushed by It”
Luke 20:9-19
3/25/07
It’s all very nice and non-threatening when we
can sit in these comfortable pews and listen to Jesus berate the
Pharisees. They deserve it, after all, on account of their
rejection of Him and His prophets. And so we listen to these
words safely detached from them, as if they said nothing to us at
all. If anything, we come away from this account saying to
ourselves, “Well, thank God I’m not like them.
I’ve never persecuted any of God’s messengers nor have I
rejected Jesus.” And we act as if we were merely spectators
at a wrestling match taking place between Jesus and the bad guys,
watching as Jesus scores yet again for the home team. You might
as well be eating popcorn and drinking a coke while you’re
sitting there.
But like it or not, you are in this battle, and you
are on the side of the Pharisees. To prove this, just consider
what your response would be to me, your messenger from God, if I
confronted you individually with your sins. For example, if I
addressed your failure at times to love your fellow believers here in
this congregation as you should, pointing out that sometimes you
don’t forgive them when they sin against you, nor do you confront
them face to face as you ought to when they offend you, but instead you
spread gossip and talk to others in the congregation about them behind
their backs. What would your reaction be to me, your pastor, if I
confronted you with this? Or how about if I addressed the way you
live for yourself at times, placing your needs and wants above others,
considering yourself more important than they, going around with an
“I couldn’t care less about the feelings and needs of
others” attitude? How would you react to that? Or how
about if I addressed your martyr syndrome: “I’m the
only one who does care about anybody! I’m the only one who
is doing the right thing. Everybody else is wrong!”
Or what if I pointed out the way you sometimes ignore and avoid certain
people in this congregation, refusing to sit next to them, call them,
talk to them, or even pray for them? Suppose I pointed out your
sins of adultery, lust, gossip, or failure to pay attention during the
sermon? What would your reaction be? I venture to say that
you would try to defend yourself, even trying to justify your sins,
blaming someone else for your behavior, making yourself out to be the
victim, to the point where you would even lash out at me, just like
God’s people did to God’s prophets whom He sent to them to
do this very thing that I’m doing now, which is what Jesus does
with His words of Law, opening up your eyes to this gapping wound you
have called sin.
You might be uneasy right now, wondering, “Why
is pastor being so harsh. Why doesn’t he go back to
speaking generically?” The reason is, that you need to see
yourself in these Pharisees. You need to see that that same
rejection and hatred of God, His messengers, and yes, of Jesus Christ
Himself that was in them is in you, in your heart, and that you cannot
sit there and say, “No, that isn’t me! I love
Jesus. I love everybody in the congregation. I would never
lash out at anyone!” But if you haven’t done it with
your actions or your mouth, you’ve done it with your inaction and
in your mind. We come here acting like good Christians, but
we’ve forgotten many times how to be good Christians towards one
another, and when we’re called to the carpet on account of our
sins, we want to kill the messenger. You and I are both guilty of
the very same sins as these Pharisees. We have not produced the
fruit of repentance that God is looking for from us - faith towards Him
and fervent love towards one another. We all deserve to be thrown
out of the Lord’s vineyard and into the fire. We all
deserve to be crushed, pulverized by the Cornerstone, Jesus Christ, and
blown away like chaff in the wind. The Jews who continued in
their stubbornness and unrepentance were destroyed; why not us?
There doesn’t seem to be much Gospel in this
text. Words like “killing,” “destroying,”
“rejecting,” “breaking into pieces,” and
“crushing” are all Law-type words. Missing are words
like “forgiveness,” “peace,”
“comfort,” and “mercy.” So, is there any
hope for sinners like us? Does this so-called Gospel text offer
any to us? Yes! You find it in the words of the Psalm that
Jesus quotes here: “The Stone that the builders rejected
has become the Cornerstone.” When you look at Psalm 118
from which these words are taken, you see that this is a reference to
God’s work of salvation. In the verses which surround it
the Psalmist talks about how God has become his salvation, how
it’s God who made this Stone to be the Cornerstone, that this was
the LORD’s doing and that it’s marvelous in our eyes.
Then he writes, “This is the day that the LORD has made; let us
rejoice and be glad in it.” So, when Jesus quotes these
words, He is pointing you to His work of salvation for you. He,
the Stone you have rejected, has become the Cornerstone, that is, He
has become your Savior. It was no accident that Jesus was
rejected by His own people. God knew that in sending His
only-begotten Son to this world that He would be rejected and
killed. But this was God’s plan for His Son all along, so
that in the Jews’ very rejection of Him and sending Him to the
cross, God set His Son up as the Cornerstone of His Church, that all
who repent of their sins and believe in Him might not perish but have
eternal life.
Jesus speaks of two responses you could have towards
this Stone. Either you fall on it and are broken in pieces, or it
falls on you and you’re crushed. Either way, you
don’t remain in one piece. To fall on it and be broken in
pieces is a reference to the brokenness of repentance. Confronted
with your sin by His words of Law, you are brought to confess that you
indeed are a sinner, the chief of sinners, guilty of all sins,
especially the sins of rejecting Christ and His Word, failing to trust
in Him as you ought to, failing to love your brothers as you ought to,
deserving nothing but His wrath and punishment now and forever.
It is to confess that you are broken before God, unable to put yourself
back together, unable to save yourself, unable to offer anything to God
but your brokenness. It is to cry out to God, “Have mercy
on me, the sinner!” Such a cry is answered with the words
of the Gospel, that this One that you have rejected in your thoughts,
words, and deeds is your Savior. He has taken the blame for your
sins upon Himself. Instead of punishing you, which He would be
justified in doing, He allows Himself to fall under your
punishment. And there on His cross He endured that punishment,
answering for your sins in your place with His blood. Having been
raised from the dead, He is now the Cornerstone of His Church, the One
upon whom the whole structure stands and depends. Your brokenness
is healed through the daily working of your Baptism. The Lord
puts you back together with His Word, recreating you to be a precious
stone to Him, and He fits you in with all the other stones He’s
put back together and is using to build His Church. Here, the
stones don’t fight against one another, but they support one
another as they all stand on Christ, the Solid Rock of our
salvation. Built upon Him you are now safe from the waves of
God’s wrath, providing you don’t abandon this Cornerstone
and His Word and venture off on your own.
There is another response towards this Stone, and
that is the response of rejection. If you will not be broken by
falling upon this Stone in repentance, you will be crushed by this
Stone for rejecting Him and His words. When the Pharisees heard
Jesus convicting them of their sins, instead of repenting and
confessing their sins and then trusting in Him for forgiveness and
salvation, they wanted to kill Him. You may be there now, hating
me for pointing our your sins and coming down on you so hard with
God’s words of Law, and by extension hating Jesus Himself,
because to be angry at and hate the messenger He sends is to be angry
at and hate Him. But this rejection hurts no one but you alone,
because in the end you will be destroyed by God’s judgment when
the One who would be your Savior must now be the One who falls on you
and crushes you with His wrath, a crushing from which there is no hope
of repair, only the despair of eternal death.. This is not what
He wants to do to you. But there are only two responses:
the brokenness of repentance, or the stubbornness of
unrepentance. There’s no sitting on the bleachers
here. Where are you in relation to the Stone? Broken in
repentance but restored by Christ, producing the fruit of faith towards
God and love towards your neighbor, or are you under the threat of the
Lord’s crushing as you insist on being stubborn and rebellious?
Lent is a season for confessing that we all deserve
to be crushed, but also that our Savior allowed Himself to be crushed
in our place. As Isaiah writes, “He was wounded for our
transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities; upon Him was the
chastisement that brought us peace, and with His stripes we are
healed.” Let us, then, fall upon Him in repentance,
confessing the brokenness of our sinful state, confessing that we have
failed in our love towards Him and in our love towards one
another. But let us also look to Him, our Cornerstone, for
forgiveness and see our salvation in His cross. Let us look to
His work in us through our Baptism, His Word, and His Holy Supper,
where He is repairing and restoring us, making us into living stones,
chosen and precious to Him, building us up as a spiritual house upon
Himself. And let us look upon one another as fellow broken but
forgiven sinners, that we may not merely act like Christians, but show
ourselves to be Christians in our behavior towards one another.
This is the day that the LORD has made; let us
rejoice and be glad in it, because this is the day of salvation.
This is the day when our sins are laid upon Jesus, when we are put
under God’s love, mercy, and forgiveness, and when we can show
that love, mercy, and forgiveness towards one another in Jesus Christ,
the Rock of our Salvation. Amen.