He told them another parable: “The Kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”
Jesus loved teaching in parables. Some of His parables were harder to understand than others, while some were quite simple. His brief parable found in Matthew 13:33 is thankfully one of the easier ones to understand, but that doesn’t mean that it’s an easy teaching to receive.
Let’s compare this parable with the warning Jesus gives in Matthew 16:6. “Jesus said to them, ‘Watch out, and beware the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees,’” (NRSVUE). This sure is a lot of talk about bread, but we can’t allow ourselves, like the disciples in the remaining text of Matthew 16, to be distracted by delicious, doughy goodness. Jesus, in these two instances, is telling us that a little bit of something can go a long way, for good or bad.
Jesus as the incarnate Son of God certainly could have come down to Earth and, with awe-inspiring power, brought the Kingdom of Heaven by force. This is, after all, the same Jesus who said that the gates of hell didn’t stand a chance against Him and His Church (Matthew 16:18). But Jesus was clear that this isn’t the way the Kingdom worked.
The Kingdom is like a tiny mustard seed or like leaven in a huge amount of flour. Little actions of obedience, simple prayers said with conviction and consistency, tiny acts of love and kindness towards our neighbors – these are the ways in which the Kingdom of Heaven and the Gospel come to fruition in our world. A little bit ends up going a long way until all those little bits together impact everything.
But in the same way, small amounts of leaven that are not of the Kingdom of Heaven can have a huge impact too. Jesus warns His disciples of the “leaven of the Pharisees,” those tiny, legalistic, and human concerns that can also, over time, infect and spoil the whole. In the same way small acts of love and holy goodness can make huge changes, so can small acts of worldly sin and human selfishness have massive impacts. These impacts not only change us, but they also change the world around us.
Ask yourself a simple question – what kind of leaven are you mixing into the flour bowl of your life in the world? Are you striving to live out small and powerful acts of Godly love, or are you unwittingly sprinkling in the leaven of the Pharisees?
Let’s all strive to be cognizant of the leaven we’re mixing and the tiny seeds that we’re planting. When all is said and done, we want steaming, fluffy loaves of bread and beautiful, fruit-bearing trees.
That all starts with the little things today.
God, help me to mix the leaven of your Kingdom into my life. Strengthen and guide me to do the small things right, loving those around me and serving the Gospel in all that I do. Amen.
Looking to have quality spiritual content delivered to your inbox? We can help with that.