Builders and Stones

Reflections on the Lectionary for Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday

Photo by James Park on Unsplash

When the gospels writers told the story of Jesus’ last days, they built the story out of the materials they had on hand. The gospels do not relay objective accounts of the events leading up to Jesus’ death; if they were objective accounts, the literary equivalent of security footage, they would all agree with each other completely and look exactly the same. Instead, the gospel accounts are each attempts to build Jesus’ story using the resources that author had handy, including and excluding things based on what was available and what fit the needs of that particular structure. That’s why they all look different from each other, and attempt to do different things: because each author had different raw materials, different goals, a different perspective, and a different final structure in mind.

In the lectionary readings for Palm Sunday, there’s a line in the Psalm—Psalm 118:22—that might sound familiar to people who have spent much time around churches. “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone,” it says. There’s a lot that could be said about that line, theologically—about the way Christianity thinks about Jesus, and about the way Christianity thinks Judaism thinks about Jesus, for example—but I want to seize on that metaphor of stones and buildings. I’ve written about this metaphor before, once at the end of last year’s Easter season, and another time a few weeks after that. Apparently I like that metaphor a lot!

In this case, in Psalm 118, the line about builders and stones seems disconnected from the other things that surround it. It’s not a Psalm about walls or stones, really; there is some discussion of gates, but really the reference to cornerstones and builders comes out of nowhere. It’s somewhat incidental to the rest of that Psalm. But Christians have seized on the line, and they have used it to describe Jesus. Jesus, Christians often say, was marginal in his own tradition and marginalized by it (which might or might not be true, and in any case veers into anti-Jewish territory). So, the thinking goes, like a misshapen stone that gets discarded because it doesn’t fit the wall, Jesus is pushed aside by his own tradition, only to become the keystone for another tradition or structure, Christianity. Or, at least, that’s the way Christians tend to talk about it.

But I want to think about that line about “the stone that the builders rejected” differently. I want to use it as a lens to think about the stories of Jesus’ death and the events leading up to it, and the ways those stories are constructed using the raw materials of even older stories and texts. This week, the Revised Common Lectionary offers two major options for what to do with Sunday March 24^th: the Liturgy of the Palms, and the Liturgy of the Passion. In both cases, whichever you choose to follow, the Lectionary collects readings from the gospels and from other places in the Bible. All of these readings together tell a story—a story curated by the people who assemble the lectionary texts. In that sense, the lectionary tells an artificial story, one that you couldn’t find by turning to any single page in your Bible. It’s a story that only works when you bring together some scattered readings and think about them together. That’s what the lectionary is always doing, really—assembling disparate readings around a common theme, and imposing that theme on texts that might or might not otherwise be read that way. In this case, the artificiality of the lectionary’s assemblage—the way it collects a Psalm and two gospel readings for the Palm Sunday liturgy, or the way it collects passages from Isaiah, Philippians, Psalm 31, and Mark for the Passion Sunday liturgy—can help us think about how builders and stones and the ways not only the lectionary but the whole of scripture is constructed.

Let’s start with Palm Sunday. The lectionary gives us two options for this story, side by side: Mark 11:1-11, and John 12:12-16. These two accounts have much in common, and also a lot of differences. They are working with some of the same raw materials, but they are building different structures with them. Most likely, some of those raw materials include eyewitness accounts or memories of Jesus’ “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem. You can see traces of that memory in these stories: both stories, for example, have the people lay branches on the road in front of Jesus (though Mark also has the people spread their garments on the road). Both accounts place the story in Jerusalem. Both gospels presuppose a crowd. These kinds of details suggest that both Mark’s story and John’s story have roots in some historical memory of the events they are describing. The two gospels need not be relying on the same person’s memory, and likely they were not. Instead, both are drawing from memory of the event, which might be collected from many different people’s recollections, and from the stories and traditions that circulated about it.

Both Mark’s story and John’s story mention a donkey—a “colt,” in Mark, and a “young ass” in John. This, too, is likely a memory preserved from the day these events happened; it’s the kind of detail that would have stood out to anyone who had been there to witness it. (But remember that Matthew actually has Jesus riding on two donkeys, one grown and the other a foal, suggesting that Matthew’s account is less rooted in historical memory and more rooted in an overly literal reading of Zechariah 9). But here, we can also turn to another kind of quarrying, and another way of building. Both Mark and John are building their stories not only out of memory, but also out of sacred texts that already existed: Psalm 118 and Zechariah 9, to be precise. Psalm 118 and Zechariah 9 were already ancient writings by the time Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem; they were probably both at least a handful of centuries old. Notice that in Mark 11:9-10, the people are exclaiming words that turn out to be quotations from Psalm 118:26. And notice that in John 12:15, the narrator is reminding the reader of Zechariah 9:9, which reads “Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

This kind of thing happens all over the gospels, in all four of them, although it happens more frequently and more obviously in Matthew than in the other three. The gospel writers are constantly citing the texts of ancient Israel—texts like the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the like—to describe things that Jesus said or did, or to demonstrate that the thing Jesus said or did had been foretold or predicted. In this example of the Palm Sunday stories, Mark is having the crowd quote Psalm 118, and John is quoting Zechariah 9:9, as a way of letting the reader know that Jesus’ actions and the events around him were part of a much older and grander story. It’s easy to get the impression, as a modern reader, that Jesus was always saying and doing things that had been foretold by scripture, and that the gospel writers were dutifully calling our attention to those things whenever they happened.

But more likely, something else was happening. Instead of imagining the gospel writers as describers of Jesus’ story who sometimes added notes for the reader pointing to predictions of parts of that story, we should imagine the gospel writers as builders, carefully selecting building materials. The gospel writers began with some raw materials: memory, for sure, and tradition, but also the collected texts of ancient Israel. But they were not simply describing Jesus’ life using those materials; they were constructing Jesus’ life. The writer of Mark, for example, almost certainly did not know what the crowd had chanted on Palm Sunday, if indeed the crowd had chanted anything unified at all. Instead, the author of Mark found Psalm 118:26, which reads “blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord,” and wrote about a crowd that chanted those words. The starting point was a text, already important in the tradition, and that text (Psalm 118:26) became a cornerstone for an edifice Mark wanted to build: the story of Palm Sunday. Likewise, the authors of both Mark and John built their tellings of Palm Sunday around the donkey. Whether or not Jesus historically rode a donkey that day (he likely did, I think), those authors started there because the passage from Zechariah 9 was such an attractive building block.

It might sound as if I have a cynical view of the composition of the gospels, but it’s not true. I am not accusing the gospel writers of any malfeasance in their work—far from it. They were only doing what any writer or editor would have done, and what any writer still does to this day. They were selecting from the material available to them in order to tell the best and most effective story. Their goal was not dispassionate description or the sanitary capture of anything like “facts.” Instead, the gospel writers were trying to tell the story of Jesus in a way that others would find convincing and compelling. This included building their stories around both memory and allusion to other literary works, like the Psalms and the prophets. That does not mean that the gospel writers were dishonest, it only means that they took their job seriously. When the author of Mark has the crowd chant the line from Psalm 118, it’s because the author wants to make sure the reader knows that the adoration of Jesus in that moment was not simply a result of charisma or the enthusiasm of a crowd, but that it was rooted in the deep experiences of Israel’s past. When the author of both Mark and John have Jesus mounted on a donkey (and when John’s narrator points out the connection to Zechariah 9), it was because they wanted the reader to recognize Jesus’ connection to traditions about the Jewish messiah and the kind of kingship involved in that prophetic text.

In this way, the gospel writers were practicing a version of what the Psalmist claims: taking pre-existing stones and using them as cornerstones for new things. In the same way the Psalm talks about builders using an unwanted stone as the foundation of something new, the gospels used pieces of Israel’s scripture to build Jesus’ life from the ground up. They had other materials, too—things like traditions that had been passed down, and perhaps even eyewitness accounts—but one of the foundational pieces of their storytelling was the scripture of Israel. They used that as the cornerstone of the whole thing.

As we think about the liturgies of the Palms and the Passion that are coming up this Sunday, and as we think about Holy Week and what comes after, it can be useful to pay attention to how our stories depend on pieces of older stories. Again, this shouldn’t denigrate things like the gospel accounts, but put them in context. The gospel stories are written the way they are—using fragments and pieces from the Psalms, the prophets, and the Torah—because the authors of the gospels were convinced that Jesus’ story was ultimately rooted in those stories, and that Jesus’ life and death was ultimately best understood as an expression in the long story of Israel and its God. When Mark starts quoting Psalm 118, or when the donkey of Zechariah 9 makes its way into the gospels, it’s because the authors of the gospels want their readers to understand something important about Jesus’ life. In the same way, the cycles of readings and storytelling that we encounter in our churches today—the season of Lent, and the stories it brings—allow us to build new narratives out of ancient texts, and put things together in new and different ways. This synthesizing instinct might be one of the hallmarks of the Christian use of scripture (and other traditions’ uses of their texts too); texts are meant to be used and reused, interpreted and reinterpreted, built and disassembled and built again, in response to new and emerging needs of the community. We are like builders, sifting through old stones, looking for just the right one to form the cornerstone of something new.