What is the kingdom of God like? And to what can it be compared?
The kingdom of God is like a father who built his family home on the upper banks of the Platte River in Nebraska, where the sandhill crane migration took place in the wetlands and riverbanks just outside their family room windows.
The father loved to watch these birds every year and kept a pair of the finest binoculars beside the window and instructed his children on how to use them. He also taught them much about the birds themselves, how to tell the males from the females, how to spot their nests. He knew a great deal about the lives and behaviors of these birds and took great delight in teaching his children about them.
Most of his children thought these lessons were boring, and the birds didn’t hold their attention the way they did for their father. But they loved him so they humored him, and even enjoyed his excitement for those silly birds out the window, even if they didn’t share it as their own.
But his youngest child was fascinated by the birds themselves. This child took the father’s instructions to heart and savored those times with him, passing the binoculars back and forth, in awe of the birds together.
When the father became suddenly ill, he spoke to his children on his deathbed and told them that his prized binoculars were the greatest gift he could leave them with, and so he wanted them kept by the window as long as the home remained in the family.
As the children grew and missed their father, they cherished those binoculars as though they were the family gold, and in many ways they were. In them they saw their father, his love of fine things, and of nature itself. To honor their father some of them had a case built to protect them, and keep them just as he left them, even writing out his last words and placing them on a plaque beside the case.
The youngest was saddened by this when he came to visit his mother, and when neither of them could find the key to the case they asked the others where it was. He was told they had hidden it because they suspected he might try to use them and they were afraid he might not handle them carefully and accidentally cause irreparable damage.
And irreparable damage he did cause. But not to the binoculars, only to the case. He pried it open with one of their dad’s rusty old screwdrivers, removed the binoculars and proceeded to enjoy the sandhill cranes in all their glory outside the windows of the family home. As he watched, his fathers lessons ran through his mind and as he observed these magnificent birds he noticed something that he never had before.
The fathers were just as involved as the mothers with the nests and the young. They even helped incubate the eggs, and later were always there feeding the young hatchlings. These fathers seemed as committed to their young as these children’s father was to them!
All of the children sought to honor their father’s gift of the binoculars, but only the youngest truly understood his heart.
