Broken by Truth, Overpowered by Love, by Casey Ferguson

Luke 20:17- 19 But He looked at them and said, “Then what is the meaning of this Scripture:
The stone that the builders rejected—
this has become the cornerstone ?
¹⁸ Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, and if it falls on anyone, it will grind him to powder!”

We live in a culture in which, oftentimes, perception is considered reality. Another way to put this is to call us a superficial culture. I challenge you to visit a bookstore today, and to look at the all the different book covers. The phrase “Don’t judge a book by its cover” doesn’t seem to apply here. The covers are designed to catch your eye, to draw you in, to send you to the cash register. We’re used to making decisions based on appearances. The difficulty comes, though, when you set the superficial as your foundation.

Psalm 118 tells a prophecy about Israel’s future Messiah, saying that the stone the builder rejected would one day become the chief cornerstone, in architectural terms, the stone upon which the whole integrity and design rests in a given structure. Jesus reminds his audience of this prophecy in the passage above, and he challenges them with a question: what does the meaning of this scripture?

Scripture doesn’t say he gave them an opportunity to answer, but I can’t imagine him not. Jesus is a revolutionary rabbi and teacher, and often his method involved posing a question in order to force his audience to think through what he was talking about. I can see a temple crowd, full of pensive faces, every person holding their tongue, patiently listening for his answer to his own question.

How’s this for an answer: “Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken… and if it falls on anyone, it will grind him to powder.” Are we still talking about a Messiah here?

In this postmodern climate we’re living in today, truth is often seen as relative, especially in the academic arena. But even in our personal lives, it’s not uncommon to listen to a friend of neighbor justifying a lifestyle or behavior, saying it’s all a matter of preference. Everyone does their own thing: this has become our motto as a nation, whether we’re discussing bedtime ritual, political bent or religious stance. Where has the standard of truth gone?

Nothing is absolute, and the philosophers of our day, rather of searching out for a basis for life that is epistemologically tenable, have decided that truth with a capital T does not exist, or if it does is unattainable.

Not only that, but there’s also an increasing trend towards pluralism, the belief, essentially, that all roads lead to Rome. These two moods overlap in our culture, blending to paint a very unstable picture of reality. If truth cannot be found, and if at their core all truths are just different faces of the same truth, we are ultimately doomed to build our worldview, our picture of reality, on a foundation without real substance. The stones we use to build our values forfeit their strength to the idea that it doesn’t really matter which stone goes where, the building will still look the same when all is said and done.

The problem with this blended point of view, though, is that the entire cosmos points to an existence and a reality full of structure and substance. The Bible says that the whole of creation points to the existence of God. The fact there are things in our own life that we treat as special and sacred betray the fact that, at our very nature, we recognize something bigger and more holy than ourselves.

The first verse of a popular new worship song, “How He Loves Me” by John Mark McMillan, goes like this:

He (God) is jealous for me.
Loves like a hurricane,
I am a tree,
Bending beneath the weight of his grace and mercy.

Looking for the connection? I’ll give it to you: our God is a God of substance. Such substance, in fact, that his love alone is enough to flatten our persons to the ground, and when we experience the fullness of his love for us we can do nothing but be overpowered by the hurricane-like power. How sublime! Jesus was telling his first century audience that they had a choice to make as to which stones they would use to build their reality.

If they chose to put him at the foundation of their worldview, to build their attitude of the world around the Messiah, the integrity within their structured reality would reflect his truth and substance. Some people might stumble over Christ, looking for the right cornerstone, and they would be broken, but they would live to tell about it. Building with the wrong cornerstone, though, taking Jesus away from the foundation of their worldview, would result in a collapse. They would be eventually crushed by the substance of his true nature.

If we’re honest with ourselves, as we’re working to piece together our own answers to the difficult questions in life, we must recognize that not every stone is identical. There is a cornerstone, a right one that offers no substitute, and we must search it out if we want to have a worldview that rightly defines life and reality. When it comes to spelling the word truth, we must recognize the fact that there is indeed a capital “T”.