The Sourdough Starter is based on Matthew 13: 33
The original parable is only one verse long; this isn’t so much a retelling as an expansion.
Breadmaking
Nowadays, it’s a bit of a judgement call whether people will be familiar with breadmaking. The advantage of factory baked bread is that it makes a staple part of the diet cheap and readily available. A disadvantage is that it’s now possible to not have a clue how to make bread.
Jesus, however, could assume his audience would all be able to fill in the gaps. They’d know that the woman would need to add water to the flour/yeast mix. Then, they’d know that once the yeast was working through, the bread would rise. They’d also realise that only the risen dough would be baked into bread and just how much bread ‘three measures of flour’ would make (a lot). Even if they’d never personally baked a loaf of bread in their lives, they’d have seen it being done.
Yeast
There’s often a misconception in Christian theology that yeast was always unclean to Jewish people.
The yeast used in Jesus’ time was definitely very unlike modern dried yeast. It wasn’t even like the fresh brewer’s yeast that keen bakers still use. Jesus grew up in a wine-making area, rather than a beer-making area, so ‘yeast’ or ‘leaven’ was probably a kind of sourdough starter. That is, a mix of flour and water, which the household (probably the women) would need to ‘tend’ for at least a week before it could be used.
A child growing up in Galilee might well have seen his mother’s ‘yeast’/starter bubbling away on a shelf at home. They may even have been told to ‘feed’ it, by giving it some extra flour.
The Kingdom (God’s nation) takes time. It also takes some work – a starter has to be checked, and fed, every single day. But give it that time and work and it will make the bread rise – and it will keep on doing that.
Unclean?
So the ‘yeast’ of ancient times was messy and needed work. It was also weird. Flour and water, left for a week – it should rot, right? But while this bubbly mess may look awful (and have a distinct smell), it’s very, very useful. Yeast, in ancient times, had both negative and positive connotations.
In Jewish thought and theology it was also a huge metaphor, because yeast/leaven was forbidden during the Passover festival. Completely forbidden – you had to search out every last bit and throw it out of your home.
The Yeast Came Back
The point Christian commentators often seem to miss is that while ‘yeast’ may have been a terrific metaphor for ‘stuff you search out and get rid of’ – it comes back after Passover. Everyone gets rid of all the old yeast – including that starter that’s been bubbling away for nearly a year. Then they start again, with the unleavened bread of Passover. Passover is kept by leaving out yeast/leaven.
But everyone who heard that metaphor would know; after Passover you bring the leaven back, this time with a fresh new batch of yeast. Hopefully a batch that won’t have that funny brown liquid on it, or even worse, mould.
Yeast the Proverb
Yeast was proverbial. It was proverbial across the ancient world as something that spreads quickly (Galatians 5:9). In Jewish culture it was also proverbial for something you needed to clean out of your house so you could start afresh (1 Corinthians 5:7). But these proverbial uses didn’t mean yeast was considered permanently unclean in Jewish culture. Bread baked with yeast (or leaven) wasn’t unclean at all – for most of the year. In fact, it was a first-fruits offering (Leviticus 23:17) and a peace offering (Leviticus 7:13)
So Why Does it Often Seem Bad?
If yeast/leaven isn’t unclean at all for most of the year, why is it so often used as a metaphor for bad ideas or bad habits?
Sourdough starters can go bad. They go bad much more easily than the brewer’s yeast, or ‘barm’, that beer-brewing areas tend to use. And if you eat bread made with a bad sourdough starter, you will get ill.
Do not use bad yeast! Or, as Jesus said, ‘beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees (Matthew 16:6). They’re a batch that’s gone sour (possibly even mouldy). Put that yeast in bread and it’ll spread quickly through the dough and make a lot of people ‘ill’. The Pharisees and the Sadducees need to clean out their ideas so they can start again.
Retelling
As I said at the beginning of this blog, I haven’t really retold this parable at all. Rather, I’ve expanded it to make it (hopefully) a bit more understandable. That expansion is trying to fill in the gaps that the original hearers could fill in themselves, but we can’t. This is a question to ask – if we don’t have a sermon/talk slot, if we just have time to tell a parable or two, should we be expanding? Is a parable so ‘long ago and far away’ that we’d need to actively retell it in a more modern setting, or can it be understandable if we just include the unspoken steps that Jesus’ audience would have known about?
God’s nation. A bit messy, a bit weird, needs attention, often looks like it should be dead and decaying. But in the right circumstances it will spread like crazy and sustain the whole community.
Just like leaven.
Previous Parable: The Watchful House Sitter: Luke 12: 35-38
Next Parable: The Lost Garnet: Luke 15:8-10
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