If you’re planning on coming to the inquirers’ class the next three weeks—or thinking of coming—this morning’s message will be a little bit of a preview of the second session. That session will be focused on the church, and that’s what Peter’s talking about this morning. I told you a couple weeks ago the apostle’s primary concern in this letter is with his hearers’ daily lives as believers in Christ loose in the world rather than with their life together as the church, and that’s true; but as I’ve said repeatedly, he’s addressing that concern by telling them who they are in Christ, and their identity in Christ (and thus ours as well) isn’t only individual, it’s also corporate. Put another way, the church isn’t just a thing we go to, or even a thing we do with other people, that we can participate in or not as we prefer. Rather, the church—being a part of the church, participating in its mission, and joining in its life—is integral to our identity in Christ. If you’ve ever heard the line “Don’t just go to church, be the church,” that’s why: on the one hand, just showing up on Sundays doesn’t mean much if that’s all it is for you, but on the other, if you’re not involved in an actual imperfect congregation of actual complicated, challenging, imperfect people, you’re making yourself less than you were meant to be.
This is true in part because church should be a place where we’re regularly given the pure spiritual milk—we might also say, the pure milk which nourishes our new life in Christ; this is why it’s critical to find a congregation where the gospel is regularly and faithfully proclaimed, rather than being set aside because “that’s just milk” and we need something better. That’s also why the responsibility rests so heavily on those of us who stand to preach the Word, because we’ve been given the gifts to serve you in that way and we will one day give an account before the Lord of how we used those gifts. More, though, as we receive the pure milk of the gospel, the church is a place where we allow our spiritual tastes to be changed. Here, more than anywhere else, as we commit ourselves to taste and see that the Lord is good, we learn to taste his goodness. Here we learn to want better than the spiritual junk food of this world and to desire more of God.
In 2:3, Peter alludes to Psalm 34:8, which we read last week. The psalm then serves as the pivot for his argument, moving from 34:8 to 34:4-5. This isn’t evident in our English translations, which are from the Hebrew text, but translating from the Septuagint—the Greek translation which Peter’s Greek-speaking Gentile audience used—we get this: “I sought the Lord, and he listened to me and delivered me from all my wanderings. Come to him and be enlightened, and your faces shall never be put to shame.” The promise in those verses connects forward to his quote from Isaiah 28, which we’ll look at in a minute. The command gives Peter his transition: if you have tasted and seen that the Lord is good, then come to him.
With this transition, Peter shifts metaphors—though the shift isn’t as abrupt or as much of a break as it seems; we’ll get to that shortly as well. Peter first calls Jesus a living stone, and we have a simple ring composition here, with just two parts. On the outside, we have his image of Jesus, set out in verse 4 and developed in verses 6-8. At the center, in verse 5, is Peter’s description of us as Jesus’ disciples. With any ring composition, you understand it by working from the outside in, from the beginning and ending to the center. With long ones like the Sermon on the Mount, once you’ve done that, you then have to unpack and interpret it section by section, but this one is short and simple enough to do all in one go.
So then, Peter calls Jesus a living stone, and specifically a living stone rejected by the builders but honored by God. He then develops that image in three ways using three different Old Testament passages. First, quoting Isaiah 28:16, he calls Jesus the cornerstone. That verse in Isaiah sits at the center of another ring composition, a more elaborate one, which is Isaiah’s parable of the builders. This actually gives us another connection between 1 Peter and the Sermon on the Mount, though an indirect one, for Isaiah’s parable underlies the parable with which Jesus concludes the Sermon, the parable of the wise and foolish builders.
Isaiah addresses this parable to the king and other leaders of Judah, who at this point in the 8th century BC knew they were the next target for conquest on the Assyrian Empire’s to-do list. Rather than turning to God, the king and his counselors chose to put their trust in an alliance with Egypt. Isaiah denounces them and their decision in vivid terms: they have allied themselves with death and put their trust in a shelter of lies made by human hands. They will be destroyed because they have chosen the world’s temporary power over the eternal power of God. God will lay a permanent foundation for a permanent and unfailing refuge, and the stone those human builders rejected will be the most important stone in the building.
Peter’s second quote is Psalm 118:22; if you were here on Palm Sunday, you may remember we talked about this one at the time. Here as in its translation of Psalm 118, the ESV uses the traditional translation “cornerstone”; as I noted then, I think this is unfortunate because the meaning of that word has become much more specific over the centuries. What’s in view here is not the first stone laid in a new building, which provides your zero/zero point for the building’s dimensions, but the keystone, the stone at the top of an arch. The keystone holds the integrity of the arch and makes it work, transferring the weight of the wall above it outward and down the arch to its vertical supports. It is the prize stone in that section of the wall, because if it breaks under the pressure, the wall is coming down. That’s why it’s often emphasized in some way.
Here, too, we have the theme of rejection, as the psalmist says the stone the builders rejected has become the keystone. As you may remember, “has become” is what’s called a divine passive, which was a common way for Old Testament writers to say God did something without having to use his name. The prophet is quoting God, so God declares for himself that he’s doing this thing. The psalmist is describing the situation from the outside, so he’s less direct. The point is just as clear either way: the builders rejected the stone, but God trumped them and made it the stone on which everything else depends.
Peter’s third quote is from Isaiah 8:14. Crucially, here the sanctuary is the “stone of stumbling and the rock of offense”—or, as Christian singer/songwriter Michael Card put it, “a stone that makes men stumble and a rock that makes them fall.” Israel’s rejection of the stone comes not before God uses it as the cornerstone of his fortress and the keystone of his temple wall, but after God establishes it as a sanctuary. Now, there are multiple words in the Hebrew covering the range of meaning from stumbling and falling to making someone else fall to giving and taking offense, but biblical Greek has two, and Peter uses them both here in parallel.
The first word he uses is proskomma. In common Greek, this was a word you would use if you tripped and fell, or if you tripped someone else. Metaphorically, then, you would also use it if you offended someone or they offended you. The second word was rather different in secular Greek, as its original meaning was the piece of wood that held a trap open. The translators of the Septuagint sometimes used it in this way, referring to either a literal or a metaphorical trap, but they most often used it as a synonym for proskomma, and so the New Testament writers generally do the same. This second word is skandalon, and yes, it’s the word—through the Latin—which gives English our word “scandal.” It’s also the word which has traditionally been translated “stumbling block,” though that term was actually coined to translate proskomma.
As Michael Card noted in the second album of his trilogy on the life of Christ, in the song I quoted a moment ago, Peter is calling Jesus the skandalon. Jesus was a scandal and a stumbling block even—or especially—to his own people, and that was part of God’s plan. In the song “Scandalon,” Card asks, “Will we ever learn that all who come must stumble?” It’s a question which should haunt us, because he’s right. Jesus’ role as stumbling block and scandal isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. The world’s striding self-suffi-ciency must be broken, and so too must the smug self-righteousness of the religious. It’s only as our bones, broken by sin and twisted to set wrong, are re-broken by love and grace that they can be re-aligned and set straight to heal properly.
We will never truly understand grace until we see and feel the scandal of it. Grace has no respect for what we think we deserve. It has no respect for what we think others deserve. It has no respect for our idea of rights, or for what we think we or anyone else should be entitled to have or to say or to do. Grace has no time for our what-about-ism, for “what about this?” or “what about that?” or “what about the guy over there?” It will not endorse either our self-righteousness or our judgment of others. As Jesus made very clear, there are times when his grace is utterly infuriating.
Jesus is the skandalon, and we must not minimize this. He isn’t a good-luck pebble for you to pick up and put in your pocket, or a stepping-stone we can use to get where we’re going, or even a rock set carefully out of the way for us to go to when we feel like it and otherwise ignore. Jesus is a massive immovable stone block sitting right in the middle of life, taking up the whole intersection and blocking traffic every which way, and he gives each person exactly two choices. On the one hand, you can admit there’s a stone there, accept the reality and significance of it, and build your entire life on and around it. On the other, you can willfully refuse to admit it’s there and break yourself on it. There’s no third way. We do need to be careful how we articulate this, because offending people doesn’t always mean you’re being like Christ; sometimes it means you’re being a jerk. All the same, if we try to make Jesus inoffensive, we’re misrepresenting him.
Moving from the outside of the ring to the center, it looks on the surface like Peter is mixing two different metaphors here, but he’s actually not. He’s using one, of the church as the temple of God, but he doesn’t use either of the Greek words that specifically mean “temple.” Instead, he uses the word oikos, which means “house.” This is the key, because in biblical usage, oikos could mean the building, or it could mean a household, family, or dynasty—as in, for instance, the house of David, meaning David and all those who descended from him. Put another way, it could mean a building or the people who belonged in that building, which in the case of the temple would be the priests. Peter is taking advantage of this ambiguity to talk about both.
Thus, on one hand, he says we’re the people doing the work of the temple. Instead of a small group of priests who were professional pray-ers for all the people of Israel who mediated between the people and God, we’re all priests to one another. This is possible because (as Hebrews takes multiple chapters to unpack for us) we now have one great high priest standing beside the throne of creation at the right hand of the Father, and he is the only mediator anyone will ever need. Since no further mediator between us and God is or will ever be necessary, we can all intercede for one another with God, bringing your prayers to our great high priest as part of our own.
The sacrifices were offered as part of the worship of the temple, but as Peter has already made clear, the sacrifices we offer to God aren’t just the actions we think of as worship. Rather, echoing Romans 12:1 as he earlier did Romans 12:2, Peter presents us with the reality that our whole lives are our sacrifices to God. He’s not explicit on this point, but it’s clear in the context of the letter, in which everything Peter is saying is about the daily life of the Christian out in the world. In particular, his use of the word “holy” to refer to our role as priests links back to 1:15-16: to be a holy priesthood, we must be holy in all our conduct, not just in those things we label “worship.”
On the other hand, of course, Peter says we too, like our Lord Jesus, are living stones. We’re being made like Christ because together with his life, we’ve been given a new nature which is like his. Note that Peter doesn’t talk about us as the earthly builders of the temple of God, as we see in 1 Corinthians 3:10-15. Rather, in concord with 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 and Ephesians 2:19-22, Peter tells us we’re the materials of which the temple is built. If we’re both builders and building materials, our call and mission and responsibility must be to build the temple with our lives. We build it with Christ as our cornerstone, laying our lives down in alignment with him who is our orientation, and we build it on Christ as our foundation, resting the full weight of our lives on him.
Take this with utmost seriousness, because if we’re both the building-stones and the priests of the temple of God, then collectively we’re the place on earth where God lives. When Jesus died, the veil in the Jerusalem temple that protected the rest of the world from the presence of the All-Holy tore in half from top to bottom. When Jesus ascended into heaven, bringing our full humanity into the throne room of all creation, he told his disciples that his presence on earth would be replaced by the Spirit of God in each of them, and in all God’s people. If this world wants to see God and know what God looks like, the only place they have to come and the only representation they have to see is us. This is “image of God” language, God’s declaration in Genesis 1:26-27 realized in the church. In the ancient world, that’s what the image of a god was: the statue of the god or goddess that stood in the temple as the focus of worship and devotion. God didn’t give this world a statue. Instead, he forbade statues and gave the world his people.
There are several implications for us in all this. First, our lives should be ways for people to come to God. We’re his image, not him, so no one should be worshiping us, but they should be able to see and reach through us to worship God in truth. We are to be the visual representation of the character of God—that’s part of what it means to be living sacrifices. This may sound daunting, but if our daily lives are offerings of worship laid down at God’s feet, we will be creating spaces for people to approach the Lord, both other believers and nonbelievers.
Second, if we’re living stones like Jesus, we’ll experience the same rejection he did, and for the same reasons. We too will be big, obnoxious stones right in the world’s way, not because we’re trying to be obnoxious or to be obstacles (a necessary observation in a culture in which so many are exactly trying to be both) but simply because we are who we are, and who we’re being made to be. Note in particular that, just like Jesus, we won’t only experience rejection from the world, we’ll also find ourselves rejected by religious folk, and especially by religious leaders—by the “builders” Isaiah and the psalmist and Jesus all talked about.
Builders of big institutions will reject us because they’re all about what works—“works” being defined as what makes all the good numbers get bigger—and “that’s not what works.” Builders of small institutions will reject us because whatever they may say, they’re building for themselves rather than God, and “that’s not what I want.” None of this is true of all big churches or all small churches; there are both true and false churches of every possible size, and I happen to think pretty highly of the other builders around this one. We must be wary of those temptations, however; and we must remember there are a lot of modern-day Pharisees and Sadducees out there, and so if we’re faithful, we’ll find ourselves rejected inside the institutional church as well as outside it. That said—and this is the third point, which I can make quickly—if we rest our lives fully on Jesus, no matter what anyone might say or do to us or about us, we will be vindicated in the end. It may not come in this life . . . but if not, that will only make it all the more complete and devastating when the vindication of God does come.
Finally, everything we’ve talked about this morning, all this, is what our lives are for, individually and as a body. We don’t exist for ourselves, and the church doesn’t exist for us. Like Jesus, we don’t exist to support ourselves, but to spend ourselves for the world; supporting us is God’s job, and he’s better at it than we are anyway. We’re part of something much, much larger than any of us, or all of us together, and the measure of our lives is—is the temple of God more glorifying to him, more true to his character, and more dedicated to his work, because we’re a part of it?
Photo ©2013 Bernard Gagnon. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. Image has been cropped to fit.
