The Stones Cry Out

I am blown away in discovering Jesus’s seemingly hyperbolic symbolic aside at the entrance of Jerusalem is actually a prophecy:
Luke 19:37-40:

“As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”

The stones crying out is a reference to the prophet Habakkuk in his dealings with Judah and the Chaldeans hundreds of years earlier.
Habakkuk 2:11-12: “The stones of the wall will cry out, and the beams of the woodwork will echo it.’Woe to him who builds a city with bloodshed and establishes a town by injustice!'”

The “stones” are the places–foundation stones of a city–where victims were buried in the founding of a new order. These human sacrifices’ bones have been uncovered in cornerstones from the Middle East to South America. In the next chapter, he reveals that he is the stone the builders rejected; he’s become the capstone. The cornerstone was the first stone laid and the capstone was an irregular shaped stone that was put aside by the builders until the final piece was needed. From the Alpha–the cornerstone of hidden victims–to the Omega, the capstone, the prized final piece of a fortress: Jesus reveals it all.

His crowds are indeed silenced by the mimetic power of group think. They abandon him during his trial and crucifixion. But in their silence, the stones–all the victims hidden our cornerstones since the foundation of human society–cry out upon Jesus’s resurrection. The Gospel unlocks the hidden power of sacrificial violence and exposes it to the daylight. The corpse stones cry out when the Gospel’s deconstruction of myth reveals what happened to them in the Passion of the Christ. He, the misfit stone, himself perfect target for sacrifice, was saved for last–and when he was sacrificed– becomes the capstone of a new world order: one that reveals the innocence of those hidden ones we founded our old order on–in the alpha-first-corner stones at the beginning of our cities.

And as the very next chapter of Luke says,

“Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.”

Jesus–The Capstone–whose stony grave is empty for all to see the futility of his community’s sacrifice of him–will break your conscience and society’s conscience–your peace–to pieces if you stumble upon him. And his Capstone is crushing all systems of power that try to continue to found works of glory and social order on the hidden victims they bury.