The Parable of The Leaven

Matthew 13:Matthew 13:33 (NIV)

He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough”.

Comment: (THE DAILY BIBLE STUDY SERIES, REVISED EDITION, BY WILLIAM BARCLAY)       

In this parable of the leaven Jesus came nearer home than in any other because He took it from the kitchen of an ordinary house.

In Palestine bread was baked at home; three measures of meal was, as Levinson points out, just the average amount which would be needed for a baking for a fairly large family, like the family at Nazareth. Jesus took his parable of the Kingdom from something that He had often seen His mother, Mary, do. Leaven was a little piece of dough kept over from a previous baking, which had fermented in the keeping.

In Jewish language and thought leaven is almost always connected with an evil influence; the Jews connected fermentation with putrefaction and leaven stood for that which is evil (cp. Matthew 16: 6; 1Corinthians 5: 6-8; Galatians 5:9). One of the ceremonies of preparation for the Passover Feast was that every scrap of leaven had to be sought out from the house and burned. It may well be that Jesus chose this illustration of the Kingdom deliberately. There would be a certain shock in hearing the Kingdom of God compared to leaven; and the shock would arouse interest and rivet attention, as an illustration from an unusual and unexpected source always does.

The whole point of the parable lies in one thing—the transforming power of the leaven. Leaven changed the character of a whole baking. Unleavened bread is like a water biscuit, hard, dry, unappetizing and uninteresting; bread baked with leaven is soft and porous and spongy, tasty and good to eat. The introduction of the leaven causes a transformation in life.

Let us gather together the characteristics of this transformation. There are four great social directions in which Christianity transformed life.

(i) Christianity transformed life for the individual man. In 1Corinthians 6: 9, 10, Paul gathers together a list of the most terrible and disgusting kinds of sinners, and then, in the next verse, there comes the tremendous statement: “And such were some of you”. As Denney had it, we must never forget that the function and the power of Christ is to make bad men good. The transformation of Christianity begins in the individual life, for through Christ the victim of temptation can become the victor over it.

(ii) Christianity transformed life for women. The Jew in his morning prayer thanked God that He had not made him a Gentile, a slave, or a woman. In Greek civilization, the woman lived a life of utter seclusion, with nothing to do beyond the household tasks. K. J. Freeman writes of the life of the Greek child or young man even in the great days of Athens, ”When he came home, there was no home life. His father was hardly ever in the house. His mother was a nonentity, living in the women’s apartments; he probably saw little of her”. In the eastern lands it was often possible to see a family on a journey. The father would be mounted on an ass; the mother would be walking, and probably bent beneath a burden. One demonstrable historical truth is that Christianity transformed life for women.

(iii) Christianity transformed life for the weak and the ill. In heathen life, the weak and the ill were considered a nuisance. In Sparta a child, when he was born, was submitted to the examiners; if he was fit, he was allowed to live; if he was weakly or deformed, he was exposed to death on the mountain side. Dr. A. Rendle Short points out that the first blind asylum was founded by Thalasius, a Christian monk; the first free dispensary was founded by Apollonius, a Christian merchant; the first hospital of which there is any record was founded by Fabiola, a Christian lady. Christianity was the first faith to be interested in the broken things of life.

(iv) Christianity transformed life for the aged. Like the weak, the aged were a nuisance. Cato, the Roman writer on agriculture, gives advice to anyone who is taking over a farm: “Look over the livestock and hold a sale. Sell your oil, if the price is satisfactory, and sell the surplus of your wine and your grain. Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous.” The old, whose day’s work was done, were fit for nothing else than to be discarded on the rubbish heaps of life. Christianity was the first faith to regard men as persons and not instruments capable of doing so much work.

(v) Christianity transformed life for the child. In the immediate background of Christianity, the marriage relationship had broken down, and the home was in peril. Divorce was so common that it was neither unusual nor particularly blame-worthy for a woman to have a new husband every year. In such circumstances children were a disaster; and the custom of simply exposing children to death was tragically common. There is a well-known letter from a man, Hilarion, who was gone off to Alexandria, to his wife, Alis, whom he has left at home. He writes to her: “If—good luck to you—you bear a child, if it is a boy, let it live; if it is a girl, throw it out.” In modern civilization life is built round the child; in ancient civilization the child had a very good chance of dying before it begun to live.

Anyone who asks the question: “What has Christianity done for the world?” has delivered himself into a Christian debater’s hands. There is nothing in history so unanswerably demonstrable as the transforming power of Christianity and of Christ on the individual life and on the life of society.

As indicated above, I copied the foregoing material from THE DAILY BIBLE STUDY SERIES, REVISED EDITION, BY WILLIAM BARCLAY. Volume 2 of the Gospel of Matthew from which this was copied is available from Amazon.com, used, for $1.04 plus $3.99 shipping. The whole New Testament, Matthew thru the book of Revelations The Daily Bible Series (17 Volume Set) is available, used, in paperback, for $99.95 plus $3.99 shipping.

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This is Ronald Miller

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