Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!
This is the first line in Peter’s letter. The letter is addressed to God’s chosen strangers in the world of the diaspora, who live in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia—provinces in what is today Turkey. He calls them chosen strangers, because they no longer quite belong where they live, because God has chosen them.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
New birth into a living hope—Peter refers to his readers as newborn infants, and urges them, urges us, like newborn infants to long for the pure, spiritual milk, the pure milk of the word.[1] In First Corinthians and Hebrews, milk also is mentioned; there it is baby food for baby Christians who haven’t matured enough in their faith to digest the solid food of weightier teachings.[2] Peter, though, is playing a different theme. Peter is not talking about milk for newborn infants who’ll eventually become meat-and-potatoes Christians.
Peter is writing to believers who struggle with how to live as people chosen by God, how to live the life that erupted with Christ’s resurrection from the dead, and he points to babies. Look at them, he says, they are new to the miracle of life, and yet they know instinctively what they need to thrive. You pick them up, you cradle them in your arm, with their head nestled in your elbow, and if they’re even just a little hungry, they’ll turn their little face toward you and with their mouths open they begin to feel their way to the source of all goodness and joy. “Since you have tasted that the Lord is good,” Peter writes, since you have tasted the sweet forgiveness, the rich mercy and abundant grace of God, desire that new-life milk and drink it. Nourished by it you will grow into salvation. Be done with pretense, be done with deceit and prejudice, be done with envy and ugly gossip, and whatever else they serve at the bar of your former life; that stuff has zero nutritional value. Not only does it not nourish you, it consumes you and those around you. Look at a baby: that’s you in the arms of Christ. Drink the love that will not let you go, drink the life given for the life of the world, drink until you want no more, drink until you drowse in sunlit bliss.[3]
At this point, the apostle makes a rather abrupt turn. Peter steps away from the beautiful intimacy between mother and child, and now he writes about stones and buildings. Stones are hard and rigid. Stones are lifeless. Dead as a stone, we say. But Peter wants us to ponder the image of a living stone. Christ is the stone that the builders rejected.
When we build something, we make a plan, and we choose and reject expertly according to our plan. We have trained our eyes to judge what is useful for our purposes and what is not. We build lots of things: Houses, towers, walls and bridges. We build homes, careers, families, lives. And we build egos. We look at others, and we are quick to assess them according to our needs, calculating whether they might be useful for our purposes. When we find them wanting, we toss them to the side—not suited for the project we’re working on, disposable people. Sin encourages us to build our lives according to our own plans and purposes and to choose or reject those around us accordingly. Sin encourages us to make ourselves the measure and judge of all things.
Christ is the stone that the builders rejected. Christ is the stone which human builders toss aside. We have our own designs and ideas, our own vision of life, our own carefully planned projects—and he doesn’t fit in. But in God’s eyes, this misfit, this reject is chosen and precious. God is building a house in the world, and Christ is critical to the design and realization of the project.
Come to him, a living stone … and like living stones let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.
Peter’s first audience were diaspora churches, scattered all over the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. The fledgling Christian communities were without legal or social status, and their members often were subject to harassment and persecution. Their faith in Jesus, the Crucified One whom God had raised from the dead, often made them strangers in their own towns and neighborhoods. They knew the sting of mockery, the pain of rejection and exclusion. They lived like resident aliens who didn’t know where they belonged and who they were or would be.
Come to him, a living stone … and like living stones let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.[4]
The word “house” has rich meanings in the Scriptures. It signifies not just shelter, but belonging, identity, community. God called Abraham to go from his father’s house, from his country and culture, to form a new house, a house founded on his trust in God and God’s promise. This new house, this new people of God found themselves in exile in “the house of bondage” in Egypt. Yet God brought them out in a mighty act of liberation, and at Sinai God made a covenant with the former enslaved people and they became “the house of Israel.” In Jerusalem, the temple was built and rebuilt as a dwelling place for God’s name, a house of prayer for God’s people marking the center of their world. We read in the gospels that one of the disciples said to Jesus as they were coming out of the temple, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Jesus told him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”[5] It was as though in those days all things were being swallowed up by the house of Caesar. Yet it was in those days that God began to build a new house in the world, and in that house, Jesus, rejected by human builders, is God’s chosen cornerstone.
Cornerstones are laid as part of the foundation upon which all else rests. They are selected for their size and strength, and the entire structure is only as strong and reliable as those stones. We don’t think of cornerstones as essential structural elements anymore. We consider them ceremonial add-ons to commemorate the year a building was begun. But Jesus is not merely a commemorative ornament in the corner of the building, not in the house God is building. So perhaps we should consider an alternate translation like keystone instead of cornerstone.
The keystone sits at the high point of an arch and it is essential for its structural integrity: remove it, and the arch will collapse. In the house God is building, Jesus, the stone that human builders rejected and continue to reject, is the keystone that holds everything together. Empire builders have no use for Jesus, but God is building a house in the world, a living structure of living stones, with Christ as the foundational cornerstone upon whom the whole projects rests, with Christ as the keystone that provides structural strength and integrity. And all who come to him likewise are living stones forming an integral part of the house, sharing a common life and offering their lives in praise and service to God.
With Christ, all who come to him are a chosen race: as living stones they become the one humanity made in the image of God. With Christ, all who come to him are a royal priesthood: they make their lives an offering of praise and gratitude in response to the unceasing flow of God’s grace and mercy. With Christ, all who come to him are a holy nation: nationalism with all its excluding attitudes gives place to a community that is consecrated to God and God’s purpose to unite all nations in their diversity into one house. With Christ, all who come to him are God’s own people: chosen and precious, a living sign that God desires one human family sharing life in justice and peace. With Christ, all who come to him proclaim with their very lives the mighty acts of him who called them out of darkness into his marvelous light.[6]
Peter does tell his readers what to do, what to desire, what to be done with, but the emphasis is on who we are and who and what we are becoming in the house God is building. We may be living in the house of Caesar, we may be living in the house that colonialism built, but we don’t belong here. We may be living in the house where every brick, every floor board and rafter speaks of ingenuity and skill, but also of injustice, domination, and exploitation. We may be living here, but we’re not at home here, we’re far from home here. We don’t belong here. We’re chosen strangers.
God is building a house in the world. This house is not built with the stones we are tempted to throw at others when we forget that none of us is without sin. This house is not built with the life-less stones of our hardened hearts. This house is not built on the dead stone that closed the tomb. The house God is building in the world is a house of living stones, a living, breathing, growing house, a dwelling place for God and a house of prayer for all peoples. In this house we hear each other’s stories, the whole story of each of us and all of us, and we see each other, we really see each other, and together we grow into salvation.
Peter’s picture includes no glimpse of a completed house, only of a house under construction. The Apostle wants to encourage us to trust the master builder. When it is finished, the house of humanity will reflect Christ in every detail.
In a similar way, the image of individual believers never arrives at any stage later than that of infants who have just left the womb, nuzzling the breasts of a maternal Lord.[7] We trust this one who is the source of all life and goodness and joy. We trust and drink and let ourselves be built into the house that love builds.
[1] See 1 Peter 1:14, 23; 2:2
[2] 1 Corinthians 3:2; Hebrews 5:12-13
[3] Penelope Duckworth, “Milk (for Clare),” Congregations 30, no. 3 (2004): 19
[4] 1 Peter 2:4
[5] Mark 13:1-2 parr.
[6] See Philip A. Potter, “Christ is God’s delegated and precious living stone,” International Review Of Mission 72, no. 288 (October 1983), 540-541.
[7] Paul Sevier Minear, “The house of living stones: a study of 1 Peter 2:4-12,” The Ecumenical Review 34, no. 3 (July 1982), 246.