The Kingdom of God is Like Leaven

Right before Christmas 2019 I took a look at facebook — something I had done very rarely in the years up to then — and was greeted with a post by a niece (my brother’s daughter) of her roughly 7 month old daughter. She had the cutest face and smile, and a bow in her hair with a very out-of-focus tree and lights in the background. Maybe a professional photo but I suspect that her dad is more than capable of the feat.

But as I looked at the photo, while I am not that good at seeing resemblances, I realized that this face I was seeing is a combination of particular genes flowing forward from numerous family lines that came together in my niece and her husband, and then just those that surfaced in my great niece.

And I was reminded of the rather brief analogy Jesus gave to describe the Kingdom of God.

In Luke chapter 13, verses 20 and 21, he says:

To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour until it was all leavened.

When talking about what it is that we do as Christians, we so often like the comparisons to salt and to light. We like to think about our testimony, whether lived or spoken, as something that is immediately effective and with great visible impact — like the immediate change in taste because of salt, or the immediate exit of the darkness when the light is turned on. But I never hear it likened to leaven.

 First, too many of the references in the Bible related to leaven are negative. The leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees quickly comes to mind. And I have even heard this particular metaphor turned on its head by a teacher who declared that the leaven was something evil added to the church that damaged the church rather than being the kingdom of God that is changing the whole world.

 What I like about this metaphor is that it is more subtle. It does not imply a splashy entrance or obvious impact. Instead, leaven is something very small relative to the flour into which it is added. And the impact, though of importance, is not always understood in terms of what the leaven did. When you eat bread, especially exceptional bread, you generally note the particular mix of grains used — whole wheat, rye, some flaxseed, etc. — or the addition of other ingredients like sugar, honey, cheese, cinnamon, etc. But leave out the yeast and it just might not be edible to modern tastes in the Western world. Yet many would not know what was wrong. They might notice that the bread is flat, hard, and possibly somewhat bitter, but still have no idea how that happened.

 When I consider the words Jesus used to distill everything into one commandment, he said “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no command in there to be splashy or overtly impactful. Instead, we are to live lives in obedience to all he commanded, which ultimately distills down to action — love. First, love for God, then love for all the people around you.

 Leaven doesn’t tell the flour how to behave. The flour responds to the presence of the leaven. The flour does not become more leaven, but bread that is more palatable than without the leaven.

 One short sentence. No commentary to clarify all the places that we might like to take that sentence.

 The kingdom of God is like leaven which a woman hid in three measures of flour until the whole was leavened.

 So in terms of this parable, if the Kingdom is the church, then we should be neither just more flower nor a rolling pin to manipulate the flower, but instead be leaven that changes the flower by our presence.