A head-on collision with the cornerstone

 This week's verses are Matthew 21:42-46:

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures:

‘The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.
This is from the Lord, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?

For this reason I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, and the one on whom it falls will be crushed.” When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him, but they were afraid of the crowds, because the crowds regarded him as a prophet.

There are a lot of verses in the gospels about how to find the kingdom of God and what it is like. But these verses are on how to lose it! Once again, Jesus is talking to the religious elite, the Pharisees, while warning us at the same time.

He is talking about rejection. Israel has rejected him. The religious elite have rejected him. The scholars have rejected him. What's left are basically the other people they have rejected. The unorthodox. The crippled. The immoral.

Israel had taken God's favor for granted. They weren't willing to hear that they had issues they needed to work on. They were descended from Abraham and used their lineage and culture as a kind of self-justification. They wanted inheritance without obedience.

The Pharisees and scholars turned God's relationship with Israel into a body of scholarly work, and then turned that stack of books and rules into a god they could control. The real God was an inconvenient distraction from the world they'd built. Salvation to them was a machine they had the blueprints for, and they knew exactly how many times to crank the lever to get what they wanted.

But don't we want those things too sometimes? Don't we want to real the benefits of a relationship with God, but without having to do any more than show up to church every week and self-identify as Christians? Don't we sometimes mistake book-learning and self-imposed rule-following for devotion and obedience?

Jesus tells the Pharisees, and us, that we are on a collision course. Either we will crash into the reality of who God is, or he will slam into us. In modern terms, Jesus might have said "Behold the clue bat is being lifted high up and is ready to be swung. Where is your head pointed?"

Jesus says the kingdom of God will be taken from people who have turned their backs and rejected him, the real him. He says it will be given to people who live out their lives with him, people who are obedient in the true love sense, people who produce the fruit of what He has planted in them. It's not what's on your t-shirt or your driver's license or your resumé, but what's in your heart and what you do with it that matters. 

The Pharisees heard his message and understood it but they didn't take it to heart. They knew he knew they had rejected him. They knew he was saying that they needed to change. They didn't care about that as much as they cared about what they had built instead.

Instead of repenting and being the folks who inherit the kingdom of God, they plotted murder. Their biggest desire was to preserve the lifestyle they had built, guaranteeing it would all be taken away from them. They had rejected God while probably believing they were devoted to him.

Be very careful about rejecting God in favor of your own choices. It is one of the only things that could separate us from the kingdom of God.