Luke 13:20–21 - And again he said, “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.”
Jesus parable of the leaven is in the running for one of the shortest parables in the gospel of Luke. I wonder if he came up with it on the spot or if it was rattling around in his mind and he was just looking for a place to insert it?
If he was waiting for the perfect time to use it, he nailed it. Jesus had just finished healing a woman, who had been disabled for 18 years, on the sabbath. This particular disability was the result of demonic oppression and when Jesus sees her, he immediately sets her free. One of the religious leaders is furious; Jesus had just broken the sabbath–and while he was in the synagogue, to boot! Jesus calmly asks the religious leaders whether they would break the sabbath if it meant providing water for some of their livestock; if they would, then how much more valuable is this daughter of God?
Luke is probably underemphasizing the disruption that likely followed. He says that “Jesus’ adversaries were put to shame” while everyone else rejoiced. As Jesus sat watching the commotion, he turned to his disciples, and perhaps with a gleam in his eye and a slight smile on his face, he told the young men around him this parable.
Jesus was incredibly strategic in the way that he advanced the kingdom in his lifetime. He could have come into the world with huge fanfare and disrupted everything and likely even overthrown Rome in one fell swoop. Instead he opted for a much more subversive method of advancement; he’d take small steps at first, and soon, it would overtake the whole world–sort of the way that leaven overtakes a whole batch of flour.
Jesus only healed one woman in the synagogue that day (that we know of). Everyone watching, however, had the hope of the kingdom put in their hearts so that they began to believe that Jesus was really who he said he was. If Jesus could do this, then what else could he do? What other power did he have? And the leaven began to do its work.
It’s also important to note that Jesus’ metaphor of the leaven wasn’t always used in a positive way. He also uses a similar metaphor for the teaching of the religious leaders. At the beginning of Luke 12, he tells his disciples to beware of their leaven, because even a little bit could spoil the whole batch.
Every day we are faced with a choice with what sort of attitude we will have, what we are going to focus on, and where it is that we will put our trust. It doesn’t take much to get the kingdom working in us, but it also doesn’t take much to derail us. Let’s take care to keep putting the proper leaven in our hearts, so that it does its work and expands more than we ever thought possible.