Cornerstone. The “cornerstone” is the first stone that is set when you start building with stone or brick. It’s the most important part of the building because the position of all the other stones or bricks are determined by the cornerstone. [Hold up piece of paper or bulletin.]
Imagine that this the cornerstone. Looks pretty square. Can you tell just by looking it? Seems like it is but if is off by as little as one degree, it can throw the whole building off. In one foot, your line in both directions will be off by .2 inches. Doesn’t seem like very much, amen? But if you’re building a church or a huge office building or skyscraper, your building could be off by 20 inches or 1.6 feet … in both directions … by the time you finish … and that can be a problem.
This can be a big problem and even cost you your life in situations like flying. One degree of error equals one mile for every 60 miles you fly. So, let’s say you start flying from Asheville to Washington, DC, which is a distance of just over 500 miles. If you are off by one degree, you will be 83 miles off course and miss DC completely. If the rockets carrying the astronauts to the moon were off by one degree, they would have missed the moon by 4,169 miles. What a difference a degree can make, amen?
[Hold up paper/bulletin again.] If such a slight variation can have such dire consequences, seems like it would be extremely important to know if you are so much as off by one degree, am I right? Well, look at this paper with the naked human eye, can you tell? I’m guessing it’s probably off by more than a degree but I can’t tell, can you? So how can we tell? Well, fortunately we have instruments that can tell us if this piece of paper is off by as small as a hundred thousandth of a degree … maybe even more. The problem is whether we trust the instruments or our own eyes.
Getting off course is very easy when you’re flying a plane. Cars are confined to the road so we only have to pay attention to what’s in front of us or behind us. We only have to think “horizontally” but you have to think vertically as well as horizontally when you’re flying a plane. When we’re driving a car, we only have to follow the road but there are no roads in the sky, no lines to follow so you have to constantly check your direction and make constant course corrections. Visual checks … like looking out your window … is helpful but what if you can’t see? Say you’re flying at night or flying through the clouds. Not only could you be going in the wrong direction horizontally but vertically as well. You could be going up or down and not even know it. That’s what they think happened to John J. Kennedy, Jr. on July 16th of 1999.
It was a hazy, moonless night when JFK Jr, his wife, Carolyn, and Carolyn’s sister, Lauren Bessette, took off from Essex County Airport in New Jersey and headed towards Martha’s Vineyard in Dukes County, Massachusetts, to attend a wedding. The wedding was in Hyannis Port but they were dropping off Carolyn’s sister, Lauren, at Martha’s Vineyard before heading to Hyannis Port for the wedding. Unfortunately, something went awry an hour into the flight and the plane crashed into the ocean and all three passengers were killed.
As you may recall, there was a long and thorough investigation and a lot of speculation about the cause of the crash but the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the crash was caused by an inexperienced pilot who had become disoriented in the dark and lost control of the plane. Although John F. Kennedy Jr. had 300 hours of flight experience, including five night flights, he did not hold an instrument rating and was only certified to fly under visual flight rules.
“Atmospheric conditions along Kennedy's flight path on the night of the crash were occasionally hazy, which can lead to spatial disorientation for pilots. The weather was officially listed as ‘visual meteorological conditions’ (VMC), which allowed Kennedy to fly under Visual Flight Rules (VFR) rather than Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), especially since he lacked an instrument rating. The visibility was very poor in Essex County, New Jersey, and airports along Kennedy's flight path reported visibility between five and eight miles with haze and a few clouds. Some pilots flying similar routes as Kennedy on the night of the accident reported no visual horizon over water because of haze.” (wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_Jr._plane_crash)
With no land in sight, no horizon, and no moon to visually guide him, the only thing that JFK, Jr., had to guide him was his instruments. The problem with flying by instrument is that it is rather unnerving to trust your fate to a bunch of mechanical and electrical devices when you can’t see and often inexperience pilots will trust their physical instincts over what their instruments tell them … often to their demise. For example, it can feel like you’re going straight when you’re actually turning because of the fluid in your middle ear. Because you think that you’re not turning you can over turn and enter what is called a “graveyard spiral.” A graveyard spiral not only feels like you’re still turning but that you’re losing attitude, which is natural in a turn, but you are so disoriented by this time that you overcompensate and end up going into a tail spin and, if you don’t know what’s happening, end up crashing. The solution is to trust your instruments.
Vestibular illusions, as they are called, can be incredibly powerful, and it's surprising how hard it is to overcome them in flight. According to one article I read, “all general aviation accidents result from spatial disorientation, and of those accidents, 90% of them are fatal (Cutler, C. 6 Ways Pilots Get Confused in the Clouds, and How to Prevent it. Boldmethods.com, December 28, 2021). “One of the best ways to overcome the illusions is to trust your instruments,” the article goes on to say, “and keep your instrument scan pattern moving at all times” (Cutler, ibid.)
They didn’t have airplanes in Jesus’ day but they did have cornerstones and the religious leaders were just as spiritually lost as anyone flying in circles on a hazy, moonless night with no instruments … and, as Jesus tries to warn them … spiritually speaking, the results could be just as devastating.
Jesus told parables as a way of drawing His listeners into the story and making the lesson something real, something that they could relate to in the world and in their personal lives. Vineyards were common in first century Palestine. The vineyard that Jesus described in His parable was exquisite … one that was carefully planned and well-maintained. It had a fence around it to protect it from animals. There was a watchtower to protect it from thieves. It had a winepress on the premises so that the grapes could be crushed right there in vineyard and not have to be transported to another site to be crushed or made into wine. The fence, the watchtower, and winepress meant that the vineyard was self-contained and had everything that it needed to grow grapes and make wine … a dream vineyard that anyone would envy and wish to own.
The metaphor of a vineyard was a common one with a long history in Judaism. In Psalm 80, the poet describes Israel as a “vine that God brought out of Egypt” (v. 8). The poet goes on to say that God “drove out the nations and planted it” … He “cleared the ground for it” and the Israelites “took deep root and filled the land” (Psalm 80:8-9) … referring to their liberation from bondage in Egypt and their journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land … a fertile land flowing with milk and honey … where they could grow and prosper into the nation that existed at the time that Jesus told this parable. At the time that Jesus told this parable, Israel, the vineyard was established. The fence around it was not a stone fence but the law and their relationship with YHWH, who brought them there, planted them and nourished them, and continued to protect them. Like a watchtower, He gave them the Law and His Word so that their spiritual enemies could not sneak up on them and take them by surprise. And He appointed religious leaders to watch over the nation and care for His people so that they could prosper and bear good fruit and produce fine wine … wine that would not only refresh and sustain Israel but her neighbors as well.
Jesus says that the man, or landlord, went to another country so He leased it to some tenants to take care of it while he was gone. There had been no Word or prophet in Israel for 400 years before Jesus appeared. While Israel may have felt that God had abandoned them, Jesus is suggesting that God was busy elsewhere, working in another country or working with other nations or people … but He had not left Israel on its own. He hired “tenants” … religious leaders … to oversee the work that He had started … to keep Israel safe and prosperous and productive … just as Jesus would send us His Holy Spirit to guide us, to keep us safe and on track, to keep us prosperous and productive.
The arrangement between the landlord and tenant was also a familiar concept to Jesus’ audience and they understood how the arrangement was supposed to work. The role of the tenants was to tend the vineyard to that it would produce a bountiful harvest. Yes … their labor benefited the landlord but it also benefited the tenants as well. While it was in the interest of the landlord that the tenants work hard and produce a quality product, it was also in the best interest of the tenants as well. They got a percentage of what they made. The more grapes they produced, the more wine they sold, the more money the landlord and the tenants received. As the quality of grapes that they produced improved, so would the quality of the wine that they produced, and the more they could charge for their product … so everyone benefitted from this arrangement, amen?
At the end of His parable, Jesus quotes Psalm 118:22: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.” I always found that strange and was never really sure what that particular scripture had to do with this particular parable. What do cornerstones have to do with vineyards? And it got me to thinking … which is what parables are supposed to do, amen?
Well, let’s get back to the purpose of a cornerstone for a moment. The cornerstone is the starting point for the foundation of a building. It determines the position of the stone next to it and the stone next to it determines the position of the next stone and so on. If the cornerstone is off by a few degrees, the next stone will be off by a few degrees and the mistake will continue to magnify on down the line and the foundation of the whole building will be off. Everything lines up according to the very first stone … the cornerstone.
When God led the Israelites to the Promised Land, He began building a nation. The cornerstone was to be their relationship with God … who was the Alpha … the beginning … Who was and is before there was anything and from whom all things came into being. In Genesis we can read how God laid out the foundations of the cosmos and then the earth. He created a garden which He gave to Adam and Eve to tend … just as He gave the Israelites the Promised Land … a garden for them to tend. In exchange for tending the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve wanted for nothing. God gave Israel a fertile land, a prosperous land to tend and in exchange, like the tenants in Jesus’ parable, they would be well-taken care of.
But the Israelites … like the tenants in Jesus’ parable … had gotten off-track and were lost. We’ve all heard of the saying, “When the cat’s away the mice will play.” Remember, the owner was in another country. He’s counting on the tenants honoring their part of the covenantal agreement that they made. They could live on the land, they could farm the land, and they could profit off the land … but the land was still his and he had a right, not only to a portion of what they made, but to all of it if he wanted to because the land belonged to him. He could throw them off at any time and hire a whole new bunch of tenants … tenants who would be grateful to be given such a fantastic opportunity. But what’s the landlord going to do, right? He’s off somewhere, distracted, taking care of business … and the tenants have the mistaken notion that they can do whatever they want without suffering any substantial consequences.
Many claim there is no God … especially atheists … because, well, where is He? In Brian Le Beau’s autobiography of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, entitled The Atheist, Madalyn, in despair, pregnant with a married man’s baby, stood outside during a violent electrical storm and challenged God to strike her and her unborn child dead. For some time, O'Hair stood in the rain waving her fist and cursing God. "You see?" she cried "If God exists He would surely have taken up my challenge." Her survival, O'Hair said, had "irrefutably proved that God does not exist” (Lott, J. God Didn’t Kill the Atheist. Realclearreligion.org, March 6, 2015). “It was this absolute conviction that gave her life purpose. She aimed to drive the Almighty out of American schools, courtrooms, every part of the public square, and to make churches pay up to Caesar” (Lott, ibid.).
You see how the principle of the cornerstone works. Madalyn Murray O’Hair challenged God to strike her dead to prove His existence. When He didn’t she decided there was no God … which led her to her next decision … to live her life as though there were no God … which led to another decision … to convince other people there was no God … which led to another decision … to prevent anyone who believed in God from practicing what they believed … and so on and so. One thought, one stone off by a few degrees, continues to not only transmit the mistake but compound it.
For the tenants, it started with a thought. The landlord isn’t here … he’s far away … distracted … so what’s he going to do if we just up and decide to keep all the profits of the past harvest to ourselves. Instead of giving the landlord his agreed share of, say 10%, why not keep it all for ourselves, eh? So, when the landlord sends a representative to collect what is due, they beat him and send him away empty handed. They know that the representative is going to tell the landlord what they did, but so what? See how the errors begin to multiply. They go from deciding to keep all the profits for themselves to violently attacking an innocent man who is doing the legal bidding of his master or employer just as the tenants should be.
The heart of Jesus’ parable is the grace and patience of the landlord. He doesn’t send the police to evict the tenants off his property as he no doubt had the legal authority to do. Instead, he sends another representative … whom they proceed to treat as roughly as the first representative. See how the error escalates? The landlord sends another and the tenants kill him this time. “And so it was with many others; some they beat, and others they killed” (Mark 12:5).
Why? Because nothing happened when they beat up the first representative. Nothing happened when they insulted and beat up the second representative. Nothing happened when they killed the third one. No matter how many representatives they beat up or killed, nothing happened ... convincing them that their actions … no matter how wrong or illegal they may be … would have no consequences. Like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, they stood in the middle of the vineyard, the blood of the landlord’s servants on their hands, spattered on their robes, sinking into the very ground that they had been hired to till … and shook their fists in the imaginary face of the landowner and said, “See! Nothing!”
Now, these “slaves” or representatives are metaphors for God’s prophets and servants. The standard belief is that the first servant is perhaps referring to the prophet Isaiah. While we have no historical record of how Isaiah died, Jewish tradition says that Isaiah was sawn in two by King Manasseh. Perhaps the second slave, or prophet, was Jeremiah who prophetically wrote: “From the day that your ancestors came out of the land of Egypt” … on their way to where? A land of promise? A fertile land flowing with milk and honey? A beautiful vineyard with a fence, a watchtower, and a winepress? … “From the day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt to this day, [says God], I have persistently sent all my servants the prophets to them, day after day. Yet they did not listen to me or incline their ear, but stiffened their neck” (Jeremiah 7:25-26). As both Jesus and Jeremiah point out, God sent many other “servants” or prophets whom the tenants or the people of Israel either abused or killed. And why do you think they kept doing it? Because there seem to be no consequences for abusing or killing a prophet just as there seemed to be no consequences for killing the servants or slaves that the landowner sent to collect his due. Like today, I think that they took the landlord’s grace as weakness or ineffectiveness because the landowner was so far away in another country. That’s just my thought on the matter.
Now … remember … what happens if the foundation stone is off by even a degree? Then the next stone is off by two degrees … and the next stone is off by three degrees … and so on. The tenants start out just beating the first servant and sending him away empty handed. They insult and beat up the second servant … and killed the third servant … and continued to keep doing this … until the landowner decided to send his son under the mistaken assumption that the tenants would respect his son. Here, the tenants not only plan to disrespect the landowner’s son and beat him up like they did the other servants but their plans had a much deeper purpose … one that crosses the line. “This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours” Mark 12:7) … which was true under the law. The tenants would inherit the land if the landowner died and he had no heirs.
What was so chilling about their plans was that they knew that the last servant that the landowner sent was his heir … just as the religious leaders listening to Jesus tell this parable knew that Jesus was the heir of His Father in Heaven … or, at the very least, recognized that Jesus was no mere servant or slave like all the other prophets they had abused and/or killed. And the truly chilling part, even if the religious leaders didn’t know it at the time, is that they, like the tenants in Jesus’ parable would beat the Son … with a capital “S” … and kill Him. Their hearts were turning in that direction but hadn’t arrived at that conclusion yet. They had reached the point where they were rejecting the ”stone that the builders had rejected” and were heading down a path that would lead to Jesus’ death.
Verse 23 in Psalm 118 and verse 11 in Mark 12 both make the comment that God’s use of the stone that the builders rejected as the cornerstone was “the Lord’s doing, and it was amazing in our eyes.” So beautiful and so amazing. The “stone” … or “person” … of Jesus Christ that the religious leaders rejected was in fact the Living Cornerstone sent from Heaven by the Lord. Remember … the cornerstone or foundation stone is the first stone laid down. Jesus described Himself as the Alpha and Omega, the what? The “beginning” and the end. As the Apostle John so beautifully pointed out: “In the beginning was the Word” … “Logos” … “and the Word was with God, and Word was God. He was in the beginning with God” (John 1:1-2). Sounds like Jesus was the first of everything … here before there was anything … here when God began laying the foundations of the universe. “All things came into being through Him, and without Him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in Him was life” … which started with Jesus … with God. Think about it. The vineyard is Israel. Israel didn’t create itself … it was created by God. The “vineyard” … the land upon which Israel was built … wasn’t built by the Israelites. It was made long before there was single Israelite on the face of the earth. The bounty of the land … in this case represented by the bountiful harvest of grapes … wasn’t created by the Israelites. The land of milk and honey flowed with milk and honey because God made it to be fertile … and then He was generous enough and gracious enough to share it with them … even providing them with a winepress so that they could enjoy the harvest and share it with each other and with their neighbors. This earth … this big, beautiful, generous earth … is filled with God’s bounty and we are just Adams and Eves, tenants here to tend God’s Garden and enjoy its bounty together with Him and with each other.
What happens when we reject the “cornerstone”? You see it all around you. This world didn’t get like this overnight. It got here by rejecting Jesus and then from there one degree at a time. First it’s remove prayer from school … then taking down the Ten Commandments in courthouses … removing manger scenes from government property … and so on and so on until, well, look around and see where it’s brought us … amen … and where we seem to be heading.
But here’s the thing … a very important thing. The Madalyn Murray O’Hairs of the world can abuse and attack and even kill all of the Lord’s servants that they want and the vineyard will never be theirs, amen? It was and is and will always belong to the One who created it, Who loves it and continues to care for it and sustain it … the One who continues to let us live in it and enjoy the benefit of its bounty. And one day, the Owner of the vineyard will return … a scary proposition for many but a hope and joy that we look forward to.
Who is the cornerstone in your life? I once rejected the Cornerstone from Heaven and found myself in a place I never thought I’d end up … wondering how in the world I got there … eventually realizing that I got there one degree at a time … one bad decision followed by another bad decision. And here’s the beauty of Jesus’ parable. It seems to end on a very somber, dark note. “What then will the owner of the vineyard do?” Jesus asks. The answer, says Jesus, is that the owner “will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others” (Mark 12:9) … others who will take care of the vineyard and honor the arrangement between the owner and the tenants. But here's the thing … and I really, truly don’t want you to miss it. The Cornerstone was standing right in front of them. Understand? The Cornerstone, the Foundation stone, came from Heaven to show us the way back … to get us back on course. It didn’t have to end with the owner destroying the tenants. The Lord didn’t want it to end that way. He told the parable in the hopes that the people who rejected Him would repent before it came to that. He came that WE might see how far off track we had become and then look to Him get us back on track. Jesus came into my life at a time when I needed a major course correction before I destroyed myself. I was in a “graveyard spiral.” It was painful to see how far off track one degree at a time had taken me, but He gave me the chance to get back on the right path. We don’t have to wait for God to send another servant … the Cornerstone that existed from the beginning, the One that came down 2,000 years ago … is still the same tried and true Cornerstone today. Imagine if the world were to begin to align itself with Jesus and the teaching in His word today … [pause].
That stone in your hand today could represent the fact that you have rejected Jesus as your Cornerstone … maybe not outright … maybe you haven’t consciously rejected Him but you have replaced Him with some other cornerstone … one from the world. Placing it at the foot of the cross means that you are willing to no longer see yourself or the world as the guiding force at the center of your life. For the rest of Lent, you can look at this pile of stones and remind yourself that Jesus is the Cornerstone that guides our hearts, our thoughts, and our actions.
Maybe you want to put your stone up here to remind you that God has always been the Cornerstone of your life but, sometimes we have to fly through clouds, sometimes we have to fly on hazy moonless nights, sometimes we trust what our eyes or our hearts or our minds tell us and they’re not always accurate, so we have to constantly scan our instrument panel to check our direction, our speed, our altitude and make constant little course corrections. [Hold up stone.] May the stone in your hand remind you that our salvation is the Lord’s doing and that it is marvelous in our eyes, amen?
