Two Houses and One Big Storm

By the time the swallows were heading back to their nests, Jesus still was not finished. All day on that hillside he had been teaching: love your enemies, pray to your Father in secret, ask and seek and knock. (By now some of the crowd had sat on the rocks so long they could no longer feel their legs.)

He knew plenty of them would cheer, go home, and change nothing. So before they left he said, "Not everyone who calls me 'Lord, Lord' will enter the kingdom of heaven. Only the one who does what my Father wants."

Then he told them a story.

"Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them," Jesus said, "is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. Everyone who hears them and does not do them is like a foolish man who built his house on the sand."

Picture the foolish man first. He finds a flat, sandy spot down by a dry riverbed. The sand is soft, and the digging is easy. "Why make it hard?" he says. Up go the walls, on goes the roof, and by lunchtime he is sitting in his doorway eating figs.

The wise man walks right past the easy sand. He digs down through the dirt and the pebbles, deeper than his own knees, deeper than his waist, until there is nothing under him but hard gray rock. His hands blister. His back aches. The man with the figs calls over, "Still digging?" But the wise man sets his house on that rock before he builds one wall.

From the road, the two houses look like twins. (Houses are sneaky that way. Nobody walking by can see what is under the floor.)

Then the rain comes. It drums on both roofs. The dry riverbed fills, and spills over, and brown water comes rushing at both front doors. The wind slams against both houses, again and again.

(In that country a riverbed can lie dry as a cracker all summer and be roaring by breakfast after one big rain.)

The house on the rock does not fall. Water swirls around it and the wind howls at it, and it stands, because it is set on the rock.

On the sand, the flood sucks the ground right out from under the other house. The walls lean. Then, with a great CRASH, down it comes, and the river carries the pieces away. "And great was its fall," said Jesus.

That was where he stopped, and the crowd sat amazed. Their usual teachers always leaned on older teachers: this wise man said so, and that one agreed. Jesus said, "I tell you." He spoke as if his own words settled everything.

Even a house on the rock does not last forever. Wood rots, and one day every roof falls in. Every teacher those people had ever heard grew old and died, and his words grew old with him.

But for a thousand years God's people had sung, "The LORD is my rock." Rock was one of God's own names in their songs. And here was a man on a hillside saying that whoever built on his words was building on rock. No ordinary teacher would dare say that. Only the Rock himself could.

Later Jesus told his friends, "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away." He promised them he would come back one day. That day will be like the biggest storm of all, the one that shows what every house was built on.

Rain, river, and wind have been beating on the words of Jesus for two thousand years. They have not moved.