October 5, 2008–Today’s Gospel text was Matthew 21:33-46. To set the stage, Jesus is in Jerusalem the last week of his life. He is preaching in the Temple and is continuing a series of parables with a strong theme of rejection. People have been given something wonderful, and they waste it, don’t recognize it or somehow mess up the situation. The theme is fairly consistent that the people appearing to not be the rightful receipients of the gift are the ones that welcome it with joy.
This series of parables ends with Jesus recalling the Psalms118:22-23 text: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.”While I’m not a Greek scholar, my NRSV says he goes on to describe this “cornerstone” as something that could be tripped over or something that would fall on you.
In Michael Yardley’s Architecture History class in the early 1990’s, he mentioned something as he described one of the most influential architectural leaps of ancient architecture: the Roman keystone. The ancient word for keystone was used interchangebly with cornerstone. The Roman keystone, or capstone, was the perfectly hewed stone that carried the load, by compression, for the arch and the load above it. This innovation allowed for spans to increase, allowed for aquaducts, great gates and walls to spread across the land with the Roman army and culture. It gained common use increasingly in the time of Jesus and the technology exploded with spinning the arch on it’s axis to form a dome as early as the first century AD.
The description of the cornerstone in the Psalms text was most surely our traditional (to lay a straight course) understanding of it, for the keystone technology would not be familiar at that time. But in the time of Jesus, the keystone would be as innovative and talked about as the Eiffel Tower, Falling Water, Bird Nest or Water Cube–but it was Roman. It symbolized the pop-power culture of the time. So I wonder if Jesus was speaking of this “cornerstone” as not just one low down, to be tripped on, but maybe as one that is both carrying and distributing the load? What would that really mean then?
I wonder if God can be both the creative spirit in the very foundational structures of the universe and still somehow be working, holding things together? Or maybe it is not that gradiose. Maybe this was a social statement, to not be so enamored with the newest technology, culture and innovation, so as to forget our core principles of humanity: love God, love God’s creation. Or maybe this was truly a carpenter’s commentary on building materials or a foretelling of the Temple’s pending fall. What do you think?
Today, some children (Sanctuary class) and I played with this story. We built a Roman arch with some beautiful blocks designed just for this purpose. The slate floor didn’t make a very even surface, but we got it together. When we removed the scaffolding, and the arch held, there was a gasp. They believed it would work, but I don’t know if they really knew it would work. Somehow all the “what-ifs” just didn’t matter. The wonder didn’t come when it all came tumbling down–the wonder was that it held up.