In a moment of pure poetry the writer of 1 Peter coined a phrase that fires the imagination of anybody wanting to know what it means to be a Christian. He described his readers as ‘living stones’. This is oxymoron in spades. It invites scepticism, horror and incomprehension. It also lingers in the memory and compels attention. Surely, we may say, the writer has fallen over himself. Putting the two words together just does not make sense.
And of course that is perfectly true. If there is one thing a stone is, it is inert. It doesn’t think, move or assert itself. It stays where it is, perhaps for a thousand years, perhaps for a billion. Ascribing life to it is like saying that gravity works upside-down for some minerals. They shoot up into the sky beyond our control. To put the two ideas together cannot make sense.
Of course, people said the same thing about pigs. They couldn’t fly. They said steel ships couldn’t float. They said Brunel’s Box tunnel would suffocate passengers as the air pressure mounted. They said giving women the vote would be disastrous. We now know better.
However, we need to look seriously at these two words. In the same paragraph the writer uses more pairs of words of a much less daring nature: ‘chosen race’, ‘royal priesthood’, ‘dedicated nation’. We can quite readily get our heads round these phrases. But ‘living stones’… We talk of being stone dead, stone deaf. Like the Mohr definition of hardness, ‘stone’ sets the standard for inertia. There is nothing like stone for what is enduring, unchanging, unresponsive, unyielding.
And then the writer combines this idea with the idea of life. We fly to what Paul had to say about human nature and Christian belief in ‘Romans seven and eight’. We are dead in trespasses and sin but to have faith in Christ is to live by the Spirit, to have a new principle at work in us.
To pursue the figure of speech, living stones can be shaped and assembled to form, along with others, a spiritual temple. Peter urges his readers to live lives according to this pattern. The ancient world found itself confounded by this new phenomenon. Living stones! What next? But those ‘living stones’ were forgiven, renewed individuals. They had encountered what was beyond all expectations. It was a daring figure of speech for what was bringing about a momentous change in world history.
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