Matthew 21:44

“And he who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but on whoever it will fall, it will scatter him as dust.”

The idea of the Stone then leads on to other aspects of the Stone in Scripture, and following on the parable with its emphasis on both judgment and restoration we have a similar contrast here. In Matthew 21:42 the Stone is restored, here He brings judgment.

The ideas are taken from Isaiah 8:14 and Daniel 2:34; Daniel 2:44, In the first case people stumble over the stone and fall heavily on it so that they are ‘broken to pieces', in the second the stone come crashing down on them ‘scattering them to dust'. Both are equally devastating in their effects. There is no escape. Jesus may well have been involved with buildings in His work as a carpenter and have seen such effects.

This verse parallels Luke 20:18, and is in fact missing in certain manuscripts (D, 33 and versions), but its attestation is extremely strong. If an early copyist wrote ‘autes' to end Matthew 21:43 and then carelessly picked up the text from ‘auton' at the end of Matthew 21:44 (easily done by a tired scribe working in the artificial light of a lamp) that may explain the omission in that family of texts. That is far more likely than that the same interpolation was introduced into such a wide range of texts. Furthermore the verse is required in the chiasmus.