Have you never read?

In my reading for my upcoming gospels class I came across the parable of the tenants. This parable of Jesus is recorded in parallel accounts in Matthew 21:33-46, Mark 12:1-12, and Luke 20:9-18. In the story a king is away and leaves his vineyard to tenants. He sends servants to gather the harvest from the tenants but they are beaten, dishonored, or killed. The landowner then sends his son whom the tenants kill. The part of these passages that struck me, though, was the passage Jesus ends with. He quotes from Psalm 118.

22 The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.

It is obvious that the Pharisees and the chief priests were among those that heard these parables because they knew that it was them that Jesus was speaking against. These were the people who took pride in their study of the scriptures. Surely they had read this Psalm. Doubtless they had chanted or sung this Psalm as it is the last of the Psalms sung during Passover, the great Hallel. Notice how Jesus introduces it, "Have you never read...?" Notice the irony. Of course they've read it! They've sung it. They should know it. And yet what Jesus is pointing out is that they missed the point of it.

The point of Psalm 118:22 is that Jesus is the cornerstone, or the head of the corner. He defines where the boundary of the walls will be. He was rejected, though, by the Jewish leaders of his day and sent to death by them.

There were two things that struck me as I was reading this parable of Christ. First, this Psalm is about Him. It had always been about Him. It was about Him for the many years that the Psalm was sang during Passover. It is about Him as Christians sing it today. Second, we need to remind one another that this Psalm is about Him. Just as the Pharisees and chief priests may have read the words but failed to see the Christ standing before them, we can have hearts that are hardened to the true Christ who is revealed in the Psalms. But for those all who have hearts that have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit, we can sing in this Psalm of Christ, the cornerstone, but also the rejected one; the sufferer.

For further study, see how the Apostlic writers continued to preach and write about Psalm 118:22. Acts 4:11, Ephesians 2:20, 1 Peter 2:7.