How do you choose a stone? This is a question my family often considers when we are in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Ever since our dating days, I have competed with my wife in skipping stones across whatever lake or river is available. I won’t share with you who typically wins, but she’s pretty good. Now my son is just to the age where he can learn the skill.
The key to skipping a stone across the river is to choose your stone carefully. It cannot be too light, or it will not glide across the water with enough force and momentum. It cannot be too heavy, or too rough; this will cause it to sink quickly to the dark depths of the river.
If you want to land on the far side of the river, you must choose a stone carefully.
On Palm Sunday. we begin by standing with the crowds who have shouted, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” This quotation is lifted from Psalm 118, the second most-quoted Psalm in the New Testament. Besides Psalm 110, no other passage is referenced as much in either the Gospels or the Epistles as Psalm 118. Verses 25-26 say this:
Save us, we beseech you, O Lord!
O Lord, we beseech you, give us success!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
The word Hosanna sums up everything in the first verse, asking for success and salvation. So many have come to Jesus through the ages looking for him to give them success … not much has changed. But instead, he gives us himself—his life, and death—“This is my Body, given for you.”
If you read Psalm 118 in its entirety, you will come across the most quoted part of it, which is lodged just a few verses (21-23) before the crowd’s acclamation: It is the portion in which the psalmist talks about how to choose a stone. The Psalmist declares:
I thank you that you have answered me
and have become my salvation.
The stone that the builders rejected
has become the chief cornerstone.
This is the Lord’s doing;
it is marvelous in our eyes.
We know that the New Testament writers routinely applied this image of the rejected stone to Jesus. It is clear, then, that Mark is making an explicit literary hyperlink to Psalm 118 in the Triumphal Entry account, intending to invoke this image as well. The people have a specific vision of the mighty warrior Messiah they are looking for; Jesus has his own vision. But as Mark invokes Psalm 118, there is more than a subtle hint that these same people will reject this same Jesus quickly, rejecting him like an unfit stone into the depths of the water.
The great Episcopal preacher Fleming Rutledge says that Palm Sunday is like having a Trojan horse pulled into the midst of your parish. The liturgy begins in joyous acclamation: “Hosanna! Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord!” But, by the end the crowd yells, “Crucify him.” This is intentional, and if we experience liturgical whiplash, we’ve understood the point. The hubris and fickle nature of humanity is thus illustrated, as we move from celebration to condemnation; we move from a joyous reception to a violent rejection.
Humanity could not receive God on his terms. The fiery love of God in Christ was so intense that the only thing we knew to do with him was to nail him to a tree.
Now, in one sense, we can all identify with what it is like to be rejected.
Surely you also have been rejected by somebody? Have you ever experienced a Judas in your life, or a crowd that turned against you, or friends who deserted you? Perhaps a face or a name comes to mind even now.
People will treat us well. People will sing our praises. And then they won’t. And that is when your true beliefs are revealed. When the parade leaves, and Judas shows up, or the crowd turns against us, that is when the topsoil is scraped off the human heart; that is the moment when what we really care about becomes clear.
Can we follow Jesus then? Can we move with him beyond the praise, to the conflict, to the abandonment, to even being rejected by others, or hurt. And then, as Christ has done for us, can we forgive? The extent to which we do is the extent to which we actually believe the Gospel.
Jesus is there for the parade, but he is determined to go beyond it to the cross—even if we can’t or won’t go with him, which we cannot. We are not our own savior. And thank God for that. For so often our relationships, born out of the parade and praise, do not survive the challenge and the crucible. But this is not true of our relationship with Christ—God makes sure of this. Even when we are faithless, he is faithful, for he cannot deny himself.
The invitation on Palm Sunday is into a Holy Week, not one in which we drown in our interior lives, anxieties, doubts, but one through which we bring all of our past into proximity with the profundity and power of Jesus’ march to the cross. Through this Holy Week we let him bear our burdens and carry us beyond the place of death to the place of resurrection, the place in which hope springs eternal.
What we will learn this week—what we relearn and remember every Holy Week—is that God’s love has a cross shaped-character all along, for this is the lamb who was slain before the foundation of the world. In other words, God is not surprised by becoming the victim and the victor.
Even as he sweats blood for us in Gethsemane, God knows we will turn to other stones to form the basis upon which we build our lives. Even as he calls out to his Father, questioning his abandonment on the cross, he is content to be tossed to the places of deep darkness—for he knows that is where he must go if we are to discover that the stumbling block is actually the chief cornerstone upon which everything else must rest.
Let me tell you how my son chooses a stone. He is all about what I call the “splashability factor.” He is not yet concerned with gracefully skipping the stone. He is not concerned with landing the stone on the banks of the far side of the river. No, his methodology is to find the largest and ugliest rock possible. He chooses the stones I have rejected, those I know will not land me on the far shore of the water. He wants to disturb the waters; he wants to throw it in with all his might so it will unsettle the flow of water, as it sinks down to the depths of the darkness and does its unseen work. And of course, now I’m not talking about my son.
In Holy Week, God will allow us to pick him up and toss him into the deep darkness. He is willing to go there, even by our hands, precisely so he can show us that being drowned in death is no match for his love. He wants to upset the waters—the waters of sin and death that have enveloped God’s creation, and most especially our hearts. He intends to refashion our cosmos, and my life and your life, with his Son as the chief cornerstone.
The gospel beauty of Holy Week is that even as this stone who is Jesus is ultimately rejected, this is God’s means by which he takes us in his hands; this is the very means by which he chooses us, even as we reject him, for he cannot deny himself; he cannot deny his cross-shaped merciful love.
Holy Week will take us into the depths and into the darkness, and paradoxically, the stone that was discarded into the baptismal waters of death, seemingly sunk to the deep dark recesses of the Jordan, this stone will be standing on the far shore of God’s promised land—resurrection life. But even if and as and when he remains unchosen by us—his face is set like flint—he will go the cross for you, and for me.
In other words, Holy Week is a great lesson in how to choose a stone.
The Rev. Clint Wilson is rector of St. Francis in the Fields Episcopal Church in Harrods Creek, Kentucky.