Leaven

Preacher Notes:

Remind people where we have been

Where we have not been yet

Introduce todays topic

33 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.”—Mt 13:33.

Depending on your translation, the word used here may be "yeast" or "leaven". The translation yeast can be a little misleading because what comes to mind for a modern reader is those little packets of dry yeast you buy at the grocery store.

But that is not what Jesus’ audience would have pictured. In the ancient world, leaven was a piece of fermented dough saved from a previous batch and added to the next one to make the new dough rise. In other words, it was much closer to what we would call sourdough starter today.

The words Jesus uses to describe what the woman does are very intentional in driving his point. He says that the woman hid the leaven in the flour. The Greek word Matthew uses is Krypto, from which we get English words like cryptic and cryptology.

Jesus could have simply described the woman as mixing or folding the leaven into the flour, and that would have perfectly captured what a baker does. But instead, he intentionally used the word hid.

He does not use the word “hid” because the woman is doing anything secretive or nefarious. He uses it to describe what happens to the leaven once it is worked into the flour. The leaven becomes hidden inside the dough. The thing you cannot see is the thing transforming the whole lump of dough.

Three Measures

SLIDE: And she is not hiding it in three cups of flour. Jesus says she hides it in three measures, which is roughly sixty pounds of flour. Think about that for a moment. For anyone who does not bake, let me put this in perspective for you. A standard bag of flour at the grocery store is five pounds.  

SLIDE: Three measures is over twelve bags! A small bakery will usually have an industrial machine in-house capable of mixing around 50 pounds of flour at a time. But this woman is mixing more than sixty pounds of flour. Once you add the water and other ingredients, it turns into roughly 100 pounds of dough.

Most professional bakers would consider fifteen to twenty pounds of dough an enormous amount for one person to comfortably mix and knead by hand in a single batch. Now imagine kneading close to one hundred pounds of dough by hand. It would be a grueling, full-body workout.

This woman is not making one or three loaves of bread for dinner. She is preparing enough dough to potentially feed 100 to 150 people. A small amount of leaven is hidden inside an enormous amount of dough, and eventually it will transform the whole thing.

Already and Not Yet

SLIDE: Notice the movement of the story. The leaven has been put into the dough, but the dough has not yet finished rising. Something has begun that has not yet reached its completion. The leaven is already in the dough, but the whole lump is not yet leavened.

SLIDE And that becomes significant when you remember the leaven represents the kingdom of God. He is not saying that God’s kingdom will arrive someday. The kingdom is already here, but it is not fully realized yet.

That is why the word hid matters so much. The kingdom can be present without being obvious.

And this helps us understand how Jesus talks about the kingdom of God and why it bothered those of his time. Jesus talks about the kingdom as though it is already here.

“The kingdom of heaven has come near.”

“If it is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.”

“The kingdom of God is in your midst.”

He even claims that in him the kingdom of heaven has arrived. But for those listening to Jesus, this raises a problem: if the kingdom has arrived, why is the world still broken? To understand that, we must understand what Israel had been waiting for.

Gospel Prophecy Charts

SLIDE: DAY OF THE LORD The prophets looked forward to what they often called the Day of the Lord. They looked around at the present age and saw sin, death, evil, injustice, and oppression.

SLIDE: But on the Day of the Lord, God would intervene. Evil would be judged, God and his people would be vindicated, God’s kingdom would be established, and death would be defeated. Creation would be renewed. The Day of the Lord was the turning point between this age and the age to come.

SLIDE: EARLY ARRIVAL However, the New Testament authors claim that something unexpected has happened in Jesus. In Christ’s Life, death, and resurrection, the New Testament says that the realities the prophets expected at the end had begun.

Jesus confronts the powers of evil. He announces the arrival of God’s kingdom. And then, at the cross and the resurrection, something happens that completely changes how early Christians understand their place in history.

Jesus rises from the dead. The resurrection was supposed to be an end-of-the-age, or Day of the Lord, event, but Jesus is raised in advance. This is why Paul calls Jesus the firstfruits of those who have died (1 Corinthians 15:20-23).

Do you know what firstfruits are? Firstfruits are the first of the harvest. Paul is saying that in Jesus, the harvest has begun, but it isn't finished. Jesus' resurrection is not simply a promise that resurrection will happen someday; it is the beginning of resurrection now!

And finally, in Jesus creation is being recreated now. In John 5:24–29 Jesus says whoever believes “has crossed over from death to life” already (v. 24), while a few verses later he says an hour is coming when “all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out” (vv. 28–29). Life now; resurrection later. Paul writes, “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). In Ephesians 2:4–6, Paul says God “made us alive with Christ” and “raised us up with Christ.” Then calls believers God's “handiwork, created in Christ Jesus.”

In Colossians 3:1–4, 9–10 Paul says “You have been raised with Christ,” and believers have “put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.” According to Paul, resurrection and renewal is already happening before the final resurrection.

SLIDE: PAUL’S VIEW To put it in perspective, Paul describes history in terms of these two overlapping ages: this present age and the age to come.

Death has been defeated, and one day death will be destroyed. New creation has begun, and one day God will make all things new. The powers of evil have been judged, and one day they will be gone.

In these ways, the kingdom has come, and the kingdom is coming.

We are living in the overlap.

Already, but not yet.

Leavening the Age of Death

And suddenly Jesus' little story about a woman making bread becomes a picture of where we are in history.

SLIDE: The leaven is already in the dough, but the whole lump is not yet leavened.

The age to come has already begun, but we are still waiting for it to reach its completion.

Now, we should be careful not to turn the parable into an allegory where every detail has a hidden meaning. Jesus does not tell us that the woman represents this, the flour represents that, and the three measures represent something else. The point is the leaven and what happens once it is hidden in the dough. It gives us an image for understanding what life is like between the ages.

SLIDE: We experience foretastes of the beauty and wonder of the age to come while at the same time experiencing the mortality and sorrows of this age.

And in the lows, it is easy to miss how the kingdom of God is like the Sower, sowing generously. Like the mustard seed, frustrating the order of this age. Like the hidden treasure, transforming the priorities of people’s lives. Like the merchant changing people’s identities.

We can see the breaking in of God’s king at

a funeral where people genuinely grieve and experience hope.

An emotionally wounded person deciding that their wounds will not have the final word in who they become or how they treat others.

A family carrying grief and still finding reasons to laugh around the dinner table.

A person battling anxiety who still experiences moments of inexplicable peace.

A nation scarred by injustice where people are still working together to make things right.

An enemy being met with love.

A person who still struggles with sin but is genuinely becoming more like Jesus.

A prayer that has not been answered the way we hoped and a God whose presence somehow meets us there.

SLIDE In all our moments of joy and sorrow, the leaven is working its way through the dough. As followers of Jesus, citizens of the Kingdom of God, Living between the ages means learning to hold the beauty of what God has already begun alongside the brokenness of what God has not yet finished.

When we know we live between ages, death, suffering, injustice, or places in our own lives that remain deeply broken are not mistaken for the absence of God's kingdom. To use another metaphor, they are seen as the flickering, dying embers of our sinful age.

And when we know we live between ages, every glimpse of healing, reconciliation, justice, beauty, joy, and love is a foretaste of the world that is coming, reminding us to trust that God will finish what he has begun.