Bible reading: Luke 19:29-40.

Message.

One of the most famous poems in the English language, familiar to generations of students, is “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It tells of “a traveller from an antique land” who had seen “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” standing in the desert with, near them and half-sunk in the sand, “a shattered visage lies”. These are the remains of a giant statue to some long-dead ruler, once mighty but now almost forgotten. The weather-worn fragments speak powerfully of the way in which human empires almost inevitably rise and then decay.

“Ozymandias”, published in 1818, was almost certainly inspired by news of an ancient statue which was on its from Egypt to the British Museum in London, although the poet probably never saw it himself. The statue, weighing over 7 tons and cut from a single huge block of granite, is called “the Younger Memnon” and depicts the famous Pharaoh Ramesses II. It was installed in its present position in 1834 and – unsurprisingly – hasn’t moved since!

And what does this giant block of stone say to us? Well, it clearly speaks of the culture and craftsmanship of the ancient Egyptians and, of course, it makes a strong statement about Ramesses himself – which it was intended to do. However it also speaks of the colonial ambitions and indifference to the Egyptians of both the French (who tried to dig it out but failed) and the British (who succeeded); it speaks of the ingenuity of the army engineers who managed to bring the statue to Britain without the use of modern machinery; it also tells us that they weren’t too concerned about damaging ancient artefacts as, in fact, they cut the statue into several sections and only took the top half – the bottom half remains in Egypt to this day.

So Shelley was right: ancient stones can speak to us, even though they are inanimate objects and have no voice. I’m sure that all of us have visited heritage sites such as castles, monasteries, stone circles, houses, even old factories, looked at the ruins (which may be extensive or just a few boulders scattered across a field), and thought, “How many things these stones must have seen: life, death, work and play – if only they could tell us about them”. Four places in Wales which I’ve found particularly evocative are Strata Florida Abbey, Blaenavon Ironworks, the Carreg Samson cromlech in the Pembrokeshire coast, and the abandoned slate-workers’ cottages at Abereiddy. We must be grateful to clever archaeologists who can often deduce and tell us something of the stones’ message; their voices are now being heard.

We’re all familiar with the Palm Sunday story. It’s one we can easily picture in our minds: Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, the crowd crying, “Hosanna” and festooning the road with palm branches. What perhaps we don’t realise (and this is also true of the stories about Jesus’ birth) is that this image is a composite one, a “cut and paste” job of elements from all four Gospels. This means that, when we look at Luke’s version, we discover that some aspects of the story which we expected to find aren’t there: he mentions neither palm branches nor hosannas. Conversely, Luke does include one tiny event which no-one else puts in: Pharisees in the crowd who are horrified at the apparent blasphemy of calling Jesus the king who comes in God’s name and who beg Jesus to silence his disciples. Jesus replies that, even if he could do that, it would be a waste of time, for the stones themselves would start shouting instead. That’s the comment I want us to think about.

But first I want to ask a question: are there any other “speaking stones” in the Bible? The answer is “yes” because several characters in the Old Testament set up stones with the desire that they record and pass on the knowledge of what God has done. So we have Jacob, worn out by his all-night tussle with an angel, erecting a memorial stone at Bethel. We have Joshua, after the safe crossing of the Jordan into the Promised Land, setting up twelve stones to commemorate this momentous event; “When your children ask what these stones mean, you will them that the Lord your God dried up the water of the Jordan for you”. Later in the same book, when the Israelites had got settled in the land and started to worship other gods, Joshua calls them together so they can repent and make a fresh start. They turn back to God and Joshua erects a large stone as a witness to the promise they have made – rather surprisingly, he doesn’t give it a name. But the last stone I want to mention does have a name: Ebenezer which, as the old King James Bible tells us, means “hitherto hath the Lord helped us”. This was set up by the prophet Samuel after, he believed, God had given the Hebrews a miraculous victory over their old enemies, the Philistines.

Let’s get back to Palm Sunday. What might Jesus have meant when he said that the stones would cry out if his disciples were silenced? I think that there are two possible answers. The first is the obvious one: that, even if the human praises were gagged, the stones would pick up the chorus of joyful praise. To put it in another way, we might say that the pressure of praise has built up to such a degree that, if people aren’t allowed to express it, it will find another way out, via the stones. This, of course, is poetic language: we know – and Jesus knew – that stones can’t praise God. But the desire, indeed the need, to praise Jesus is so great that nothing will stop it bursting out.

Perhaps we can take this theme a little bit further. For, if we look back to the Old Testament, we find several references to natural or inanimate objects praising God. Psalm 96 speaks of all creation, including the heavens, the sea and the fields, praising God, the trees of the forest singing for joy; there are similar sentiments in Psalm 98 where, memorably, the rivers are exhorted to clap their hands, and the mountains encouraged to sing. Psalm 148 adds elements such as lightning, hail, snow, clouds and winds into the mix of praise; while the climax perhaps comes in Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out to the ends of the world”. When Jesus says that the stones would praise him even if humans could not, he is yet again declaring himself to be none other than God. For they would not praise anyone else.

So that’s one thing Jesus might have meant. But there is another possibility for, as happens so often in the Passion story, Jesus’ words don’t just come out of thin air, they are in fact a quote from earlier Scripture. In this case Jesus is quoting the prophet Habakkuk (who’s probably not at the top of the “most read” Biblical authors). The prophet wrote, “The stones of the wall will cry out, and the beams of the woodwork will echo it” – which doesn’t make a lot of sense out of context, although it’s worth noting that, in the Bible, this phrase “cry out” often implies anguish or pain – for instance, after Cain kills Abel, God says that his blood “is crying out from the ground”.

So let’s set our verse in its surroundings: “Woe to him who builds his house by unjust gain, setting his nest on high to escape the clutches of ruin! … 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!”. This isn’t praise, far from it: Habakkuk, like so many of the Old Testament prophets, is denouncing the greed and injustice of the rich and powerful; in fact he is predicting their downfall. If we link Jesus’ comment to this verse, and if we recall that he was being acclaimed by ordinary, humble folk rather than by the Jewish leaders and their Roman overlords, we come to only one conclusion: that the peoples’ praise of Jesus is also a protest about their oppression, an expression of their desire for freedom. Even if the authorities shut them up, the stones will keep on shouting.

Can we reconcile these two ways of understanding Jesus’ words? Is it possible for believing people (I’m not saying “Christians” as the folk who welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem were, of course, Jewish) to praise God in worship while also wailing in lament and crying out in protest? I believe that it is, that it’s in fact important to do both – even though there are some folk who’d prefer to come into church, shut the door, and worship God with no reference to the world outside. Certainly many of the African-American churches have managed to combine protest and praise: the distinguished theologian James Cone believed that the enslaved or oppressed black people of America found spiritual liberation as they worshipped together; he said, “Only those who do not know bondage themselves can speak of liberation in a detached way; only those who have not been in the ‘valley of death’ can sing the songs of Zion as if they are uninvolved”. Our worship should reflect, challenge and transcend our woeful situation; we cannot remain silent.

The Palm Sunday crowds that acclaimed Jesus represented a huge threat to both the Jewish and Roman authorities. Was Jesus starting a freedom movement which they wouldn’t be able to suppress? (The answer to that question is actually “No”; but they didn’t realise that).

Some of us might recall the events of autumn 1989. During that year four churches in Leipzig, East Germany, held weekly prayer meetings. At first these were small, but the numbers began to swell as political dissidents and ordinary citizens joined the Christian believers. After each meeting the groups would link up and walk through the streets of Leipzig, holding candles and banners and singing hymns. Similar demonstrations started to spread across the country.

On October 9^th, everyone was on edge. It was the 40^th anniversary of the Communist state, and the authorities were not happy with the prayer meetings and processions which they saw as a provocation. Police and army units moved into Leipzig; hospitals were cleared to receive casualties. Everyone expected to see a bloodbath, but it didn’t happen – there is a rumour that Mikhail Gorbachev himself phoned from Moscow to say that there must be no shooting. The cork was now out of the bottle, demonstrations spread across the nation, and a month later the Berlin Wall fell; the Communist regime fell with it. Largely similar events took place in Timisoara, Romania, leading to the deposing of the cruel dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, although there the security forces opened fire and killed hundreds of demonstrators. Did the stones cry out in Revolution Square on that night of protest and violence? I’ve been there and I very much hope that they did.

Christians today don’t, by and large, find it hard to praise Jesus, although there may be times when world news makes that difficult. However our corporate praise is usually confined to church buildings; I suspect that they are hardly heard by those outside (except, perhaps, as a noise nuisance). The days of public, if controversial, “Marches for Jesus” when Christians paraded through the streets singing their songs seem to have passed; worship has become a private affair. Making our voices heard in protest can be even harder; those of us who have been following Christian Aid’s Lent course can see all-too-clearly the structures in society which imprison people in poverty but are struggling to know how to make our feelings heard. We want to speak out, we feel we must, but we worry that we will be drowned out or ignored.

As we travel around, we can in fact see many stones that cry out, sometimes but not always with words; war memorials with their plea “lest we forget” are an obvious example, so are foundation stones (this one is on the outside wall of this building). The wall of a ruined cottage in Ceredigion became a rallying cry for the people of Capel Celyn whose village was flooded to create a reservoir for Liverpool. The words “Cofiwch Dryweryn” painted on it has become have become a political slogan for Welsh nationalism and have been repeated in several other places, printed on T-shirts, and made into badges.

In West London a wall has become an informal memorial to the people killed in the Grenfell Tower fire. Nearly 8 years after the disaster it is still a poignant and powerful cry for justice and action. Here in Cardiff a group of stones quarried from the cliffs of Penarth commemorate the Eisteddfod of 1899. The stones were moved to make way for City Hall and re-erected in the wrong order! There’s no plaque beside the stones: perhaps their voice has been distorted or muted.

Let’s move to Washington D.C., where two long walls of granite are inscribed with the names of 58,320 service personal who were killed, taken prisoner or counted as missing during the Vietnam War. Finally we go to Berlin where 2,711 concrete slabs have been laid in rows to remember the Jews murdered in the Holocaust. But, by commemorating Jews alone, does it say that others who died were less important or suffered less? The slabs convey more than one message in their cry.

So: are we crying out? Should we be crying out? And, if we’re not, who will cry out on God’s behalf and refuse to be silenced?