will be taken away for this

from you the Kingdom of God shall also be given to the people that bear its fruits (Matt. 21:43)."

When Jesus spoke of the stone rejected by the builders and referred to the Scriptures, he was referring to Psalm 117 and the prophecy of Isaiah (8:13-15). Archbishop Innocent explains these sayings in the following way: "The 117th Psalm contains a solemn hymn with which David gives thanks to God in the temple after the deposition of his enemies. The Jewish state is compared here to a building, the builders of which are Saul and the elders of the 12 tribes of Israel. The stone they rejected is David, whom God Himself later placed at the head of the corner, making him king and conqueror. And since David was a divinely ordained prototype of his great Descendant, the Messiah, many features of his reign and personal destiny are mysteriously related to Jesus Christ. It must be assumed that Jesus Christ had in mind the following passage from the prophecy of Isaiah (8:14-15):

And He (i.e. the Lord of hosts) will be

a sanctification, and a stumbling block, and a rock of offense to both houses of Israel... and many of them will stumble, and fall, and be broken. In the present case, Jesus understood Himself to be under the stone. Those who fall on this stone are those of the Jews who, tempted by His humiliated state, did not accept His teaching. For such people, repentance was easy, and they endured only one punishment – the deprivation of blessings. But there were also people among those who did not believe in Christ, on whom the very stone had to fall in order to crush them, because they sinned not out of weakness and ignorance, but out of malice and violence; they were unrepentant, and therefore unworthy of pardon. One of these terrible falls followed with the destruction of Jerusalem" ("The Last Days of the Life of Jesus Christ").

The chief priests and Pharisees, embittered at Jesus for publicly denouncing them, would have been ready to take Him and immediately kill Him with their own hands, but they were afraid that the people would intercede for Him, considering Him if not as the Messiah, then as the Prophet.

The Parable of the Wedding Feast