Stage Five, Kingdom People Who Love Like the Master: Love Does Not Have One Face
Stage Five, Kingdom People Who Love Like the Master, is one of the six faces in Kingdom People: 19 Parables, Six Stages — living as the Master would while he is away. It is the only stage with four parables, because love has more than one face. Waiting, grace beyond arithmetic, an open door, forgiveness passed on — four faces, not one.
One view of a thing will not let you build it
A drawing shows one object on several sheets.
The front view, the top view, the side view. Set side by side, they fix the shape. From the front you cannot read the depth; from above you cannot read the height. Not one of them is the object. The three together are.
And when the object is complicated, three is not enough. A rear view gets added, then a bottom view, and any slanted face gets a sheet of its own drawn square to it. How many views are needed is not decided by whoever is drawing. It is decided by the object.
Kingdom People: 19 Parables, Six Stages reads the nineteen kingdom parables in Matthew across six places. Stage Five is where you love like the Master. Five of the stages carry three parables. This one carries four.
Four does not mean this stage matters more. It means three would not fix the shape.
Draw only the love that waits and it comes out as mere softness. Draw only the love that overrides arithmetic and it comes out as giving anything to anyone. Draw only the love that throws every door open and it says nothing about what happens inside. Draw only the love that passes on what it received, and it sounds like a debt.
The four hold each other up.
The most common misreading of this stage is to take the one kind of love you are good at for the whole of it. People practised at patience decide patience is love. People practised at generosity decide generosity is love. Then they measure everyone else with that one ruler.
Nobody reads a drawing that way. You go back and forth between the front view and the side view with your eye. You never finish one sheet and move on to the next, because a single dimension runs across both. This stage has to be read the same way.
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Four parables, four different jobs
Four parables belong to Stage Five in Kingdom People: 19 Parables, Six Stages. The four are love’s four faces.
The first is the one who sowed good seed (Matthew 13:24–30). Weeds turn up among the wheat, and the servants ask whether they should go and pull them. The owner says no — pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. He does not leave them out of softness. He leaves them because he knows the roots are still tangled. The face that waits.
The second is the vineyard owner (Matthew 20:1–16). The man hired at dawn and the man hired at five in the afternoon are paid the same denarius. When the early workers grumble, the owner answers: don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Are you envious because I am generous? The arithmetic is not wrong. The place simply does not yield to arithmetic. The face that overrides the sum.
The third is the king who prepared a wedding banquet (Matthew 22:1–14). When those invited will not come, the king sends his servants to the street corners to bring in anyone they find — bad as well as good — until the hall is full. And then one man without wedding clothes is put out. No threshold, and yet there are clothes. The face that calls everyone and still does not seat them any way at all.
The fourth is the king who forgave the debt (Matthew 18:23–35). A servant let off ten thousand talents walks out and seizes a fellow servant who owes him a hundred denarii. A denarius was a day’s wage and a talent was six thousand denarii, so what he was forgiven ran to six hundred thousand times what he grabbed for. Counted in wages, it was a debt that would take two hundred thousand years to work off. And the hundred denarii in front of him looked bigger. The face that lets it flow.
Held apart, the four are a farming story, a payroll story, a banquet story, and a debt story. Set side by side, they are four views of one face. Waiting, overriding, calling, releasing. And each one holds up a different one of the others. The face that waits turns into neglect without the wedding clothes of the third parable; the face that overrides arithmetic turns into cheap grace without the fourth. That is how the four fix the shape of a single love.
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Why long-time believers stop here
Ten thousand talents against a hundred denarii is six hundred thousand to one. And to his eye the ratio ran the other way.
It is at that line that long-time believers stop.
Being forgiven was a long time ago. You could not put a date on it now. But the person who owes you was at it last month and again yesterday. What is old looks small and what is near looks large. That is simply how a human eye works.
And so one relationship in a church quietly sets. Worship goes on as before, service goes on as before. You only avoid the room that person is in. Give it a few years and the avoiding becomes a habit that no longer even hurts.
At which point most people settle it like this. It is not that I am without love. That one person is just difficult.
Which is true. And settling it with the one face you are good at is exactly this stage’s trap. Practised at patience but unable to let anything flow. Generous, and unable to wait. It is holding one view of an object and claiming to know the whole of it.
I have watched the same thing happen many times in the closest place of all.
Listen to a husband and wife whose marriage has gone wrong and you almost always arrive at the same spot. The two of them are facing in entirely different directions. Anyone listening sees it at once. And the two of them will not concede it, right to the end. Neither takes the other’s direction as a difference; each only repeats that his own direction is the right one.
People call it a difference of temperament. But the difference was never the problem. Not being able to see a difference as a difference was.
Kingdom People: 19 Parables, Six Stages makes the location plain. Stage Five is not where you are told to love more. It is where you find out which face you have not drawn yet.
Is the place you are standing a staircase you stopped climbing, or a face you have not yet turned to look at?
In front of that question, having no love and having only one face are two different things.
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All four faces were in one room that night
There is one place in Scripture where you see all four in a single person.
It was just before the Passover Festival. Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end (John 13:1).
That night he poured water into a basin and washed his disciples’ feet.
Judas was in the room. John does not hide it. He notes that the devil had already prompted him, and he gives what Jesus said after the washing: you are clean, though not every one of you. He knew. And knowing, he washed those feet.
The refusal to pull the weeds is in that room.
The same basin took all twelve pairs of feet. The man who had followed for three years and the man who would sell him that night put their feet in the same water. No arithmetic produces that. The owner who paid the same denarius to the dawn worker and the five o’clock worker is standing here.
And it was not that nothing was said. Not every one of you, he said. The doors of the banquet are open and there are still the clothes.
Then, when the basin had been set aside, he said this:
I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you (John 13:15).
He set the pattern so that what they had received would not stop with them. That is precisely what the servant forgiven ten thousand talents did not have.
So loving like the Master is not an order to manufacture love. It means the pattern is already drawn. And what someone holding a drawing has to do is not invent something — it is to build to what is there.
Stage Six of Kingdom People: 19 Parables, Six Stages is where accounts are settled and judgment is rendered. The one who entrusted it comes back and asks. But for anyone who lived like the Master while he was away, that question is not frightening. They were only carrying on with what they had been doing.
When the basin was set down, no one had understood yet. But what he had shown them was already all there in the room.