Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24 Commentary

Sometimes I think the Revised Common Lectionary wants to test the creativity of us preachers.  Just last week for Palm Sunday / Passion Sunday, the Year A Lectionary served up either Psalm 118 or Psalm 31.  Now on Easter we get Psalm 118 again and if you look ahead a little down the RCL road, you’ll see Psalm 31 is coming up again for the Fifth Sunday of Easter on May 3.  Granted, they chop up these psalms differently each time but in the end, each individual psalm has its own unity and thus you wonder how many creative ways you can find to preach from essentially the same passage within a relatively short time frame.

Oh well.  So here we go on Psalm 118.  As has been noted often in the Psalm sermon commentaries here on the CEP website, Psalm 118 earns two prizes in the Bible.  First, it wins the prize for being the most often cited Old Testament passage in the New Testament.  Second, I’d give it the prize for being the most unlikely Old Testament passage to win the first prize!  This isn’t the call of Abram, the binding of Isaac, or the exodus from Egypt.  Even in the Book of Psalms itself this isn’t Psalm 23, Psalm 51, Psalm 100, Psalm 150 or any number of other psalms that are far more familiar to most people than is Psalm 118.

Yet that nugget in verses 22-24 about how the rejected stone ends up becoming the most important stone in an entire edifice caught the eye of several New Testament writers who seized on this as the perfect metaphor to describe Jesus.  Jesus was the despised and rejected one.  When he wasn’t being misunderstood by everyone from his own disciples to the religious leaders of the day, he was being understood just fine by people who then turned right around and rejected the message they had heard from Jesus.  And ultimately since the Jewish religious authorities had struck out time and again in getting rid of Jesus or getting his adoring followers to stop taking him seriously, they colluded with their otherwise despised Roman occupiers to, in the end, quite literally cross Jesus out for them.

And yet . . . that stone that the builders rejected became the head of the corner.  Some of us may be familiar with the song from the folks at Hillsong, “Cornerstone” whose chorus includes the words, “Christ alone, Cornerstone, Weak made strong, In the Savior’s love.”  The unexpected inversion of the weak one, the crucified and rejected one, becoming the key to everything captured for New Testament writers the great reversal that just is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead on Easter morning.

But let’s not lose sight of something else that the writer of Psalm 118 foresaw in terms of the work of Jesus Christ (even though this writer could not have known just how God would bring to fulfillment what he wrote about.  Most biblical writers told more than they knew!)  Listen to these verses:

¹⁶  The Lord’s right hand is lifted high;
the Lord’s right hand has done mighty things!”
¹⁷ I will not die but live,
and will proclaim what the Lord has done.
¹⁸ The Lord has chastened me severely,
but he has not given me over to death.
¹⁹ Open for me the gates of the righteous;
I will enter and give thanks to the Lord.
²⁰ This is the gate of the Lord
through which the righteous may enter.
²¹ I will give you thanks, for you answered me;
you have become my salvation.

Because that rejected stone of Jesus of Nazareth passed through death for us, now death is not the end of us but the pathway by which we will enter the gates of salvation after we have been clothed with nothing less than the righteousness of Christ himself.  Psalm 118 previews for us what we call the doctrine of justification.  We get credited with the righteousness of Jesus.  When we, as Paul wrote in Colossians 3, “put on Christ” almost as though donning a wool sweater, that is all God sees when God looks at us: the perfect and holy righteousness of Jesus.

And just that is what the victory of Easter means of course: eternal life that emerged from nothing less paradoxical than death itself.  The ashes of repentance we placed on our heads in the just finished Lenten Season get blown away and replaced with a crown of righteousness—indeed, with Christ’s own righteous crown.  These are the glorious truths of Easter that wring from us believers cry after cry of “Hallelujah!”

So OK, Psalm 118—like that rejected stone at the center of this song—is itself that least likely of psalms that makes a big splash in the New Testament after all.  As it turns out, this psalm also has an awful lot to contribute to Easter Sunday as well.  Thanks be to God!

[Note: For the Year A Season of Lent and leading up to Easter, CEP has, in addition to these weekly sermon commentaries, a special Lent and Easter Resource Page with links to whole sermons, commentary on Lenten texts, and more.]

Illustration Idea

Years ago Frederick Buechner published his Fosdick Lectures under the title of Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Comedy, Tragedy, and Fairy Tale.  For that third section of the book, Buechner has a good time playing with the unlikely nature of the Gospel story and the Savior at the center of it all.  And he reminds us that we are perennially attracted to fairy tales because we all get a kick out of stories with unexpected turns of events.  We like it when the pauper gets elevated to being a prince, when the ugly duckling blossoms into the most beautiful and elegant of swans, when the warty frog just needs a kiss to become a dashing prince, when Cinderella goes from despised scullery maid to the belle of the ball whose lost glass slipper will lead to a whole new life.

We see these fairy tale elements in the Gospel.  But as Buechner says, whereas some of those fanciful stories are too good to be true, when it comes to the Gospel story of that rejected stone of Jesus who becomes the Cornerstone of the whole new creation, well, that is a story that is too good not to be true.

As a little bonus here: since Psalm 118 has the same opening (and closing) as the beginning of Psalm 107 (“Give thanks to the Lord for he is good, his love endures forever”) I commend Wendell Kimborough’s version of Psalm 107 for your listening pleasure.  Maybe playing it while writing your Easter sermon will prove inspiring!  The YouTube video of the song is also very clever and moving.