Tuesday, Nov. 5

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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.” All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables; indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet: “I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.”   - Matthew 13:33-35

In this parable, Jesus uses the image of leaven (some translations may say yeast) to describe the kingdom of heaven.  Yeast and leaven are not quite the same thing.  Leaven is actually a small lump of fermented dough, that is dough with yeast in it.  Yeast is actually a single celled fungus that has been used in baking and brewing for centuries.  In fact, there are ancient ovens and breweries in Egyptian ruins dating back over 3,000 years!

At the time of Jesus, women didn't simply go down to their local grocery store and buy a package of yeast In fact, the active ingredient, yeast, was not well understood until modern micro-biology came along.

Pioneer housewives understood the tremendous worth of a good lump of leavening. They always saved out a portion of the day's leavened dough for the next batch and great care was taken to see that the lump of leavening would not harden and loose its effectiveness. The cost in time and labor to produce new leaven from scratch was a terrific burden compared to now, when we simply purchase a small packet of yeast from our local grocer. 

Clearly there is a difference between yeast and leaven, and between dough that has life and the dough that does not. Equal portions of both, the eye cannot tell them apart, but inside, one has life within it, and the other one is just dead dough.

Jesus’ use of this image of leaven to describe the kingdom is actually quite surprising.  Yeast was often considered a symbol of corruption and decay in Jewish tradition, so it would have been shocking for Jesus’ audience to hear the kingdom of God to be compared to yeast. In fact, every other time in Scripture that leaven is used as a metaphor, it is used in a negative sense.  

Luke 12:1 - Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. 

1 Corinthians 5:6-8 - Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump...Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

So, why does Jesus use this image to describe the kingdom?  

One of the reasons seems to be that Jesus wants to challenge the traditional understandings of the kingdom. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls the poor, the sorrowful, and the persecuted “blessed,” a designation that would have been counter-intuitive for people who were taught that God rewarded the virtuous with material prosperity.  Jesus also establishes new principles for discipleship and holiness that go beyond the previous standards of the Mosaic Law.  Jesus’ association with sinners and fishermen instead of scribes and Pharisees was another clear sign that the kingdom of God that He announced was going to shake things up a bit.  

So, when Jesus uses leaven to describe the kingdom, He is telling us that His kingdom is not at all what most people would expect.  His kingdom is something new, unlikely, and surprising!

Jeff Frazier