The Fourth Sunday of Easter Year B
Taken from Twelve Months of Sundays Year B
Description
The Fourth Sunday of Easter
Acts 4.5-12
1 John 3.16-24
John 10.11-18
The text about the rejected stone has itself become something of a stumbling stone. The point of the quotation from Psalm 118.22 is that, though Jesus appeared to the ‘builders’ of Judaism (the Chief Priests in particular) to be unusable, God had other ideas. The unique shape that made the stone useless for their building qualified it exactly to be the cornerstone, or keystone, of God’s building. One stone and only one of that shape was needed: Jesus is it.
Thus, as the next verse explains, ‘there is salvation in no one else’. No other name will do; if it’s salvation you want, it’s Jesus or nothing. What arrogance, shrieks the relativist. This is Christian imperialism, sniffs the secularist. Many paths up the same mountain, murmurs the sophisticate. This is now becoming a fashionable argument against the bodily resurrection of Jesus: it commits us, people say, to a politically incorrect view of ‘other religions’. It means that Christianity possesses a truth that the others do not. Back comes the answer from the early Christians: only one resurrection; only one Jesus...
Taken from Twelve Months of Sundays Year B by N T Wright