Stones – Holy Week, 18 March 2016

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”  (Luke 19:39-40)

I seem to remember commenting quite recently how anyone who has been to the Holy Land knows that it is a landscape of stones, dry stones and rubble lying around.  Stony ground, and I wondered how often the local medical clinics deal with turned ankles and the like – perhaps mostly with tourists.  Stones are prominent in the gospel records.  Peter’s name means a stone, and Jesus made it a metaphor for that special kind of faith.  Here in the gospel for Palm Sunday, the Pharisees are unnerved because the crowd hails Jesus as the promised Messiah, but he says if he stopped them doing that the stones would cry out.  On another day he had told the Pharisees and all the men clamouring around the woman caught in adultery, Let whoever is sinless among you throw the first stone.  His parable about the sowing of seed mentioned what they all knew about, the difficulty of seed falling in stony ground. 

It was a stone that was rolled across the tomb where they buried him – and was found rolled back on the Sunday morning.  An angel sitting on a stone said, He is not here, he is risen.  In Israel stones are a persistent problem, and in our day the Knesset has just legislated very serious penalties for anyone throwing stones at the police or the military.  But some orthodox Jews believe that throwing stones at enemies is a righteous act even on the Sabbath.

However, the point in all this is Jesus’s colourful way of saying that there is no way to stop the people’s excitement.  The Pharisees couldn’t stop them, and neither could he.  He never wanted to be called Messiah – he had made that quite clear.  It was dangerous, but more importantly, the Messiah they were expecting was not the sort Jesus would ever be.  The people are expressing a deep, clamant need, a need for hope… is that what it is?  Anyway, if that need, that cry is suppressed or denied, if anyone tries to clamp the lid down on it, the very stones will take it up, says Jesus.  It is something dictators, tyrants, oppressors, have discovered all through history.  The moment we start erecting fences, building walls, restricting freedoms, hiding truth, denying dignity, we simply trigger a counter-reaction… and any student of history can give 101 examples.  It applies equally to the life within.  Build fences around what we are allowed to believe and we confine and restrict life itself, the life God has given. 

When we choose to sit in prayerful silence and stillness, we are choosing the freedom of God’s Spirit – which, Jesus reminded Nicodemus, is like the wind – the wind which, James K Baxter wrote, blows both inside and outside the fences.  The people greeting Jesus were indeed unwise, they may have been in various ways mistaken, but they were giving voice to their spirit calling out for God’s Spirit.  And Jesus knows that God hears that – even the stones are listening.