Catholic Commentary
The Rejected Stone Made the Cornerstone
22The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.23This is Yahweh’s doing. It is marvelous in our eyes.24This is the day that Yahweh has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it!
Psalms 118:22–24 describes God's reversal of human judgment, wherein the stone rejected by builders becomes the cornerstone—a structural stone of supreme importance. The psalmist testifies that this divine elevation is marvelous and calls the community to rejoice in the day the Lord has made, viewing God's intervention as miraculous and decisive.
The stone the builders threw away becomes the cornerstone—and Jesus claims this as his own story, inviting us to trust that rejection by the powerful is never God's final word.
Psalms 118:22 — "The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone"
The Hebrew word for "cornerstone" (rosh pinnah, literally "head of the corner") denotes a stone of supreme structural importance — either the massive foundation stone upon which an entire building is aligned, or the capstone that locks an arch into place. In either reading, the function is the same: this stone determines the orientation and integrity of the whole structure. The verse begins with rejection — the builders, the very professionals whose job it is to assess stones, have discarded this one as unsuitable. The contrast is stark and almost paradoxical: the ones with authority over the building project have made the worst possible professional error, and God has overturned their judgment entirely.
In its original historical context, this verse likely celebrated Israel's own experience of being despised among the nations, only to be elevated by God's election. The psalm was almost certainly a processional hymn sung at the Temple in Jerusalem, perhaps connected to the festival of Sukkoth (Tabernacles). The rejected stone may have originally referred to the Davidic dynasty or the nation of Israel itself — marginalized by the great powers of Egypt or Assyria — now vindicated and placed at the center of God's saving plan.
Yet the verse strains beyond any single historical application. The very grammar of reversal — rejection followed by elevation — makes it a template for the divine economy at its deepest level.
Psalms 118:23 — "This is Yahweh's doing; it is marvelous in our eyes"
The psalmist does not simply note the reversal; he names its author. The passive construction underscores divine initiative: this was not accomplished by human cleverness or political maneuvering, but is min Yahweh, "from the LORD." The word translated "marvelous" (niphlāʾt) is the same root used of the plagues of Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea — it belongs to the vocabulary of miraculous, saving intervention. The addition of "in our eyes" is significant: the community is bearing witness to something they have seen and that has transformed them. This is not speculative theology but testified experience.
Psalms 118:24 — "This is the day that Yahweh has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it"
The "day" (yôm) here is not merely a calendrical unit but a theologically charged moment — a kairos in which God has acted decisively. The call to rejoice (nāgîlâ) and be glad (nišmĕḥâ) is plural and communal: the whole assembly is summoned to respond. Liturgically, this verse became one of the most beloved in Jewish and Christian worship precisely because it transforms the event of divine intervention into an ongoing celebration that can be re-entered each time the psalm is prayed.
The Typological Sense
The typological reading of these verses was not a later Christian imposition — it was initiated by Jesus himself. In Matthew 21:42, Mark 12:10–11, and Luke 20:17, Jesus quotes verse 22 directly after the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, explicitly identifying himself as the rejected stone. In doing so, he invites his hearers to read his coming passion as the ultimate instance of the pattern the psalm describes: rejected by the authorized builders of Israel (the chief priests and elders), he will be made by God the cornerstone of a new Temple — the Church, and ultimately the new creation. The "day that Yahweh has made" then becomes Easter Sunday, the day of resurrection, which the early Church recognized as the eighth day of a new creation, the hinge of all history.
Catholic tradition brings several distinct illuminations to this passage that other reading traditions may underemphasize.
The Christological Reading as Literal Sense. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, following Dei Verbum §15, teaches that the Old Testament finds its fullest meaning in Christ, and that Christ himself is the key to reading the Psalms in their deepest intention. St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Commentary on the Psalms, argued that the literal-historical and the Christological senses here are not in competition but concentric: the historical stone-and-builder image is genuinely literal, but its deepest literal referent is Christ, whose resurrection is the act of God to which the psalmist, under inspiration, was already pointing.
The Cornerstone and the Church. St. Peter — himself renamed "Rock" by Christ — quotes this very verse in 1 Peter 2:7 and applies it ecclesiologically: Christ is the living stone, and believers are "living stones" built upon him (1 Pet 2:4–5). Ephesians 2:20 reinforces this by declaring the Church built upon the "cornerstone" of Christ, with the apostles and prophets as the foundation. The Second Vatican Council's Lumen Gentium (§6) draws on this Stone imagery to describe the Church's essential dependence on and orientation toward Christ as her foundational principle.
Easter and the Liturgy. The Roman Rite's use of verse 24 ("This is the day the LORD has made") at Easter Vigil and throughout the Easter Octave is not incidental. The Church Fathers — Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, and St. Augustine (Enarrationes in Psalmos 117) — all read verse 24 as the Church's cry on the morning of the Resurrection. Augustine writes movingly: "The day that the Lord has made — not the day made by the revolution of the sun, but the day illumined by the Sun of Justice." This connects resurrection to the new creation inaugurated in Christ, fulfilling the "day" of Genesis 1.
Contemporary Catholics inhabit a culture that prizes credentialing, expert consensus, and institutional validation. The builders of verse 22 are not villains; they are doing their jobs, applying their professional criteria — and they get the most important judgment of their lives catastrophically wrong. This passage is a direct rebuke to any form of Christianity that measures the worth of the Gospel by whether it is approved by the powerful, the credentialed, or the culturally dominant.
More personally, Catholics who feel marginalized — in workplaces where faith is treated as a private eccentricity, in family situations where their commitment to Church teaching is met with bewilderment or contempt — can find genuine solidarity with the rejected stone. The psalm does not promise immunity from rejection; it promises that rejection is not the final word.
Verse 24 gives this an urgent liturgical form: today is the day of divine action. Praying this verse at Morning Prayer (Lauds), as the Liturgy of the Hours assigns it, is an act of re-orienting the whole day around the resurrection. Before the emails, the appointments, the anxieties — the Christian declares that this day belongs to God and has already been marked by his decisive victory. That is not optimism; it is faith grounded in the empty tomb.
Commentary