The Confusing Sayings: Luke 20:18
Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.
This article is part of a series explaining Jesus’s Confusing Sayings.
If any of Jesus’s verse’s are confusing to you, let me know in a comment and I can analyze its Greek in a future article.
The saying explained in this article follows Jesus asking the Pharisees the meaning of the quote from Psalms 118:22. His question to them was the topic of the previous article in this series. In it, Jesus suggests that he is the rejected stone that becomes the “capstone of the corner.” He then continues the image of a stone in this verse but in a strange and confusing way. Here is a modern Biblical translation of what Jesus said in Luke 20:18:
NIV: Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.”
The words that we will be discussing in this article are shown in boldface.
Like many of these verses in this collection of confusing sayings, the translation seems easily understood as a simple threat. This is because the translators translated the Greek in a way the doesn’t accurately reflect what Jesus said. The problem starts with the previous verse, which confuses the type of stone to which Jesus is comparing himself.
This verse appears to contrast two different types of people who have problems with this stone that represents Jesus. This is a disguise for what it really is. Its general claim is that people are changed by encountering Jesus, and that, eventually, the whole world will be changed by him. This last claim is buried so that he couldn’t be accused of saying he was going to overthrow Rome.
It is impossible to understand this message if we don’t understand the nature of the stone itself. It is misconstrued in the previous verse as the cornerstone, but Jesus is comparing himself not to a stone in the foundation of a building, but to a “coping stone,” a stone on the very top (see the previous article). The people he describes are those who fall on the stone are on top of the building. What the stone falls upon is an Old Testament reference wrapped in subtle language.
Those on Top
Jesus is a capstone but of what building? Mistranslated as “cornerstone,” we might think it is his church. But the stone is not the foundation, but a capstone, added at the end of the building process. At the time, Jesus had no church. What building would his religious listeners have heard him referring to? The Temple in Jerusalem. In a very subtle way, Jesus describes himself as representing the height of the Judean religion. He is more than that: he is a stumbling block in that religion. Twice Jesus describes people as lucky if they are not “tripped up” by him (Matthew 11:6, Luke 7:23). He uses the verb form of the word that means stumbling block. And it is not just one person that falls. It is “everyone” from the Greek word meaning “all.”
Envisioning houses today, we cannot easily see how anyone, much less everyone, could fall on a stone on the roof. Judean houses had flat rooves. These open top floors were used for a variety of outdoor purposes, much like we use roof decks today. The word translated as “fall” also means “cast down.” If the building is religious Judaism, it means that they fall away from the form of that religion at that time or are cast down from it.
The result of this fall, according to the NIV, is that they are “broken to pieces.” The Greek verb, however, doesn't mean "broken to pieces" but the opposite, "crushed together." The prefix means "together" and should appear in the translation because the root word by itself means "crushed." Jesus usually uses the prefix of “together” in a positive sense. This could have been heard as being forced together with all the others who had tripped over this stone.
Watch Out Below
Before we go further, let us look at how people of the time would have heard this verse:
Every one falling upon that stone there will be crushed together. But when it falls upon it, it will scatter it.
The same verb meaning “to fall” is used in both parts of the verse. The key phrase begins with a “but when” that is untranslated in the NIV. The “when” indicates that this is something that Jesus expected to happen. The mystery is the meaning of the two boldfaced “its” in that last line. They are pronouns in the form of objects, what is fallen upon and what is scattered. The mystery is that they do not clearly represent any nouns in the verse. The “it” subject is clearly the stone doing the falling, but what does the stone fall upon and scatter? The immediate context gives us nothing.
This line is a very subtle reference to the story in Daniel 2:35 where Daniel interprets a dream of Nebuchadnezzar’s. In that dream, a rock strikes an image representing history’s great kingdoms and destroys it. The rock is described as one not cut by human hands. The image is smashed and its pieces blown away like chaff from a threshing floor. The rock grows into a mountain that covers the earth.
Uncharacteristically, Jesus doesn’t use any of the Greek words from the Septuagint version of this story, but this reference is strongly suggested by the last verb, translated as "grind him to powder" and "be crushed." The Greek verb actually means "to winnow", which is to separate grain from chaff by tossing it up in the wind so the wind blows off the chaff from the grain. This is what is described in the Daniel story. The word also means "to scatter", which is a nice opposite to the earlier "crush together".
If we think of the stone as a capstone for the House of Israel, the stone falls when the house falls after Jesus’s death. Its people are scattered. Rome and the known world are covered by the mountain of Christianity.