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The Parable of Kingdom:
the Kingdom or a Kingdom
T. Dave Matsuo
©2025 TDM All rights reserved No part of this manuscript may be reprinted without permission from the author Contact: tdavematsuo@4X12.org
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The Beginning
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Begin. & Chap.1 |
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How, not just where, did you grow up? I grew up in a big city, in a typical inner-city neighborhood occupied by diverse people. What this became for me is a formative story of how I grew up, not where. And I hope and pray that what follows will encourage you to piece together your own story. That is, your story of how you grew up, because each of our lives is a vulnerably personal life story that makes up a broader narrative composing a parable of kingdom.
This narrative voices kingdom with a sound either reverberating as merely as a kingdom, or resounding as the kingdom—namely, the parable of God’s kingdom and how God wants us to live and experience life together as God’s people. The following parable will clearly distinguish that nothing less and no substitutes from God can voice the kingdom, while exposing anything less and any substitutes voicing a kingdom. Thus, what is heard next will be the parable amplifying the consonance or dissonance with how God wants us to live in everyday life.
Continuing my story, my family lived in a multi-unit apartment building that was one block away from my elementary school. I had a brother 5 years older than me and various other kids in our building, plus other kids living on our block. At different times and ways the kids on our block came together in a variety of activities, including just hanging out and talking.
When not in school I would spend most of my time making these different connections. I learned different games, how to ride a bike and various sports. Most interesting, a group of us from my brother’s age to mine would regularly sit outside the base of our apartment building and just talk, mess around and simply be together—for example, on most evenings when the weather allowed. Since I was usually the youngest, my mom would routinely call out to only me from our 3rd floor porch, “Time to come in!” and I would sadly say goodbye to the others who didn’t have to go home.
While my identity was formed in this neighborhood collective, what had the most lasting influence on my life was the sense of community that we experienced together. These frequent connections we had together formed bonds in our relationships, bonds that were lacking in my biological family. Thus, I usually didn’t feel lonely, and later I missed our connections as persons went off to different high schools. This formed a gap for me, because I no longer had relationships bonding in community; and this condition became the subtle norm in much of my student and young adult life. Notably, this relationship gap evolved even though the internet and social media had yet to exist to preoccupy everyday life.
This was my beginning, which reveals a shared story of human life—my chapter among many other chapters of a recurring cycle formed “in the beginning.” As these stories are shared, they vulnerably bring to the forefront elements signifying the parable of kingdom that gives voice to the desire, need, recourse or futility in the search for community. Most important, as we hear these narratives, we can discover (1) what does not and what truly does constitute the kingdom created by God for human persons (individually and together), and (2) how this uncommon kingdom becomes the relational reality for us.
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In the Beginning
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Entire Parable in PDF |
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In the beginning chapter of the human story, a couple of persons made connection in their neighborhood. They engaged in creative activities that benefitted their neighborhood, but most of all they formed a relationship bond between them that was very satisfying to their basic need and desire. In the course of their life together with the sense of community, they became distracted from what was essential to their persons and relationship together. Consequently, their unique vitality got infected by self-interests and the desire to pursue their own gains, which came at the expense of their relationship together. Their individualism determined how they now lived, and this created distance in their relationship; and this relational distance subtly raised barriers to the deeper connection earlier enjoyed to their full satisfaction. As expected, this change voicing how these persons now lived also widely affected the neighborhood, such that the loss of community became the evolving norm in the human context. Other persons who were initially influenced by the formation of community in the beginning later tried to build a sense of community in their neighborhoods based on their assumptions about humanity. Some assumed that human life could co-exist together by better extending the individualism of the initial two persons above. Others assumed that humanity is monolithic and thus that everyone should be the same in their identity and lifestyle. Each of these assumptions led to experiments in human life, which, in one way or another, continue to be attempted even to this day. In other words, humanity has been on an evolving journey roaming through human life in search of community. The relational condition fulfilling persons in the bond of relationships together that constitutes community—just as the original persons experienced with satisfaction for their relational reality in the beginning—has become an elusive consider. Therefore, humanity is populated by migrants searching for a place to belong, seeking their homeland, or the created roots for human life. This has been the historical story of God’s people, which the parable keeps unfolding. Their story has evolved through a fragmented history without arriving at the wholeness of their created identity and function. A relatively recent chapter of this story reverberates in human history. Searching for a place to belong and call their home, a group of migrants journeyed to a “new” neighborhood. They established footholds in this neighborhood by pushing out the original occupants or by subordinating these persons rather than joining with them in relationships together as community. The migrants dominated the neighborhood as their domain and voiced a unidimensional identity and unilateral function to characterize their land as God’s kingdom. To be expected, the composed tune voiced by this emerging neighborhood faced differing or opposing compositions voiced by surrounding neighborhoods. In the process of suppressing variant compositions, those neighborhoods were subjected to the manifest destiny of God’s so-called kingdom, and even subject to its rule. This “new” neighborhood may not have considered its approach to community to be typical for humanity, because it assumed to be on a religious basis ordained by God. In actual fact, the reality is that they were engaged in sociocultural issues amplified increasingly by a political means to serve their ethnocentric end. Underlying their policies were subtle as well as blatant economic, racial and even gender biases, all tuned to their ethnocentric frequency. One of the repercussions this has on the neighborhoods was pervasive discrimination such as NIMBY (not in my back yard). Thus, this neighborhood was not unique to humanity but reflected humanity’s human condition. Typical of the human condition, this neighborhood of God’s people merely became associated with each other as a substitute for deeper relational connection. The consequences, therefore, for this contemporary association considered God’s neighborhood involved becoming composed by a gathering of disconnected persons essentially “alone together.” Their condition was not the exception but the norm for the neighborhood. Thus, unintentionally reflecting the human condition, they belonged in a structure of a collective without the vital significance of direct connection in the depth of heart-to-heart relationships together. Not surprising to those paying attention to the human condition, their prevailing condition separated them from the only relationships that (1) would satisfy their whole persons, and (2) could fulfill their created function in the primacy of relationship together in the likeness of the whole of God—not a fragmented God shaped in the likeness of their image (cf. Ps 50:21). The process evolving from migrants to what the parable defines as a collection of orphans is a human dynamic that is rooted in the human condition of all neighborhoods. In my childhood neighborhood I enjoyed a taste of community, which didn’t satisfy my need or fulfill my function but only pointed to the desire for more. So, what are you learning about your neighborhood? Many neighborhoods perpetuate the human condition in its various forms. Unfortunately, many neighbors are complicit with this perpetuation and thereby occupy their role as a major part of the problem reinforcing and sustaining their neighborhoods, even neighborhoods comprised of God’s people. The latter, with good intentions or not, by default perpetuate merely a kingdom as a substitute for the kingdom. The parable of kingdom identifies various substitutes used to voice the kingdom of God. The reductions of God’s kingdom from its wholeness is symptomatic of human endeavors from the beginning. These endeavors at building community may even have started with good intentions to address the human need. Nevertheless, they all still voice the insignificance of anything less and any substitutes used for the experiential truth of God’s kingdom—the kingdom blessed by God’s redemption of persons for the kingdom reality of their relationships together in wholeness (cf. Nu 6:24), the uncommon wholeness constituted only by and in the whole of God (cf. 2 Cor 3:18).
© 2025 T. Dave Matsuo |