¹⁷ Jesus looked at them and said, “Then what does the Scripture mean where it says, ‘The Stone rejected by the builders was made the cornerstone’?” ¹⁸ And he added, “Whoever stumbles over that Stone shall be broken; and those on whom it falls will be crushed to dust.”

¹⁹ When the chief priests and religious leaders heard about this story he had told, they wanted him arrested immediately, for they realized that he was talking about them. They were the wicked tenants in his illustration. But they were afraid that if they themselves arrested him, there would be a riot. So they tried to get him to say something that could be reported to the Roman governor as reason to arrest him.