As I read the Passion Narrative this year, the word “stone” kept leaping off the page at me. It was not a word that I thought much about yet from Palm Sunday to Easter morning, “stone” is used a number of times.
· Luke 19:40-Palm Sunday-The Pharisees wanted Jesus to silence the crowds. Instead, Jesus responded, “If the crowds keep quiet, the stones will cry out!”
· Luke 20:17-18-Holy Week-Jesus taught in the Temple that the stone the builders rejected has become the chief capstone. A number of years ago, an architect friend told me that the capstone is the last stone and the center stone laid when creating an arch. It is the one that when in place, puts the correct amount of pressure on the other bricks or stones in the arch so that they do not collapse.
· Luke 21:5-16-Holy Week-The disciples were commenting on how impressive Herod’s Temple was, adorned with such beautiful stones. Jesus, however, prophetically declared that a day is coming when not one stone will be left on another.
· Luke 22:41-Gethsemane-Jesus withdrew from the disciples about a stone’s throw beyond them. Jesus was always a stone’s throw beyond what the disciples could grasp and here on the night He was betrayed it was that distance that kept them from seeing Him sweat blood as well as be ministered to by an Angel.
· Luke 24:2-Easter Morning-The Stone was rolled back.
I Corinthians 10:3-4 states that Jesus was the “Spiritual Rock” that followed Israel in the wilderness. Israel drank from that rock that followed them and that rock was Christ!
No wonder David was able to kill Goliath. He used a stone. Could that stone have been Christ?
Jesus named his leading disciple after Himself (the Rock that followed Israel) when He changed Simon’s name to Peter. Rock. Large Stone. Later, when Jesus reinstated Peter after Peter had denied Jesus three times, Jesus calls him by his former name, Simon, not Petros. Jesus was telling Peter between the lines that he had not behaved like his master, who had turned his face like “flint” (a type of stone) to the road of suffering ahead of him.
Isn’t it fascinating that in the first temptation of Jesus, Satan tempts Jesus to turn “stones” into bread. The response is that man does not live by bread alone but by The Word. Then on Maundy Thursday night when Jesus, the stone the builders rejected, takes bread and declares, “This bread is Me (the stone) in substitution for you, do this in remembrance of Me! Satan had been close, but the timing was all wrong.
Another time in Jesus’ ministry, He told the crowd who had brought a woman caught in adultery, “He who is without sin cast the first stone.” Again, we see the Rock that followed Israel was Christ. He and He alone was the only one who could have cast the first stone.
I do not think that it is by accident that Jesus was placed in a rock hewed tomb with a stone that served as the doorway to the death place. Since Jesus is the stone that the builders rejected….since Jesus is the rock that followed Israel in the wilderness...since Jesus was the stone that killed the Giant, isn’t Jesus also, by His once and for all sacrificial death, the one who opens the passage from death into life? God moved that stone. The stone no longer shut the door on death. Instead, the stone was moved in order to allow life to escape. There was no body. The stone was rolled away!
