Thursday, October 29

He told them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.”  - Matthew 13:33

Let’s continue to examine this remarkable little parable that Jesus told about the Kingdom of God being like leaven. I am amazed at how much truth Jesus can pack into one simple little story like this.  

One of the amazing things about this little parable is how it challenges our conventional ideas about what God’s Kingdom should be like. There are several surprising and even subversive ideas in this little story. We can see how Jesus was teaching that the Kingdom starts out small, and grows slowly, but produces unmistakable results. We can also see how shocking it would have been for people to hear the Kingdom compared to the domestic activity of a woman baking bread.  

One of the most often overlooked and most surprising elements of the parable is the amount of flour that is used. It is often missed because it is not entirely evident in most English translations. “Three measures” is the usual translation for the original Greek “tria sata” which is a little over a bushel of flour (1.125 bushels, to be precise). That’s a ridiculously large amount of flour - you’d need a 100-quart Hobart mixer with a dough hook as big as your leg to knead it!  

Translating into kitchen measures, 1.125 bushels is 144 cups of flour.  Presuming we used a common recipe for basic white bread that uses 5 ½ cups of flour, 144 cups is enough to make 26 batches of bread of two loaves each, giving us a total of 52 loaves, each weighing about a pound and a half. If we’re frugal but not stingy, we can get 16 slices out of a loaf, yielding 832 slices, enough for 416 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (we’d need 33 jars of jelly, and 64 of peanut butter).  

What’s the message of the story? It’s simple: The kingdom of heaven is like a woman who wants to do more than feed her family. The kingdom announced by Jesus is like a woman who wants to feed the whole village. The kingdom of God is like a woman who wants to feed the world.  The kingdom is for everybody!

Additionally, the message of the Kingdom (the gospel) is meant to be passed on. The woman must save back a portion of the leaven each time she bakes bread in order to use it in the next batch. So too, when we are transformed by Christ, share a portion of His transforming grace with others! The leaven of God’s grace that is working its way into and through your heart and life doesn’t stop there... it is not enough that we ourselves are transformed by Jesus, He wants to spread the leaven of His gospel through us into the lives of others.  

Jeff Frazier