Yeast

People used yeasts from very early in our history. The ancient Egyptians and Chinese, for example, used yeast to ferment and form their alcoholic beverages and bread nearly 5,000 years ago. Sumerians, Babylonians, and Akkadians – ancient cultures – used plant yeasts. Yeasts are microbial (tiny to see) single-cell organisms of the fungus family.

If forming bread, the yeast eats sugar and starch in the flour mix and releases carbon dioxide, which lifts and aerates the dough, giving us wonderfully fermented bread. Unleavened bread, in contrast, is bread without yeast or aeration.

The Hebrews ate fermented bread throughout the year and unfermented or unleavened bread during festivals like the Passover to signify they didn’t have the luxury of time to wait for the bread to aerate and give it flavor as they were in a hurry to eat and travel. Everyone in Jesus’s time would have been aware of how yeast was used in preparing bread and alcoholic drinks, even if they weren’t familiar with the science and techniques behind them.

(My mother always made curd or yogurt at home by leaving a little yogurt from daily usage and adding milk to it at night. The following day, the yeast in the curd fermented the entire milk, and we had a full container of yogurt again. Lori, too, follows this when we are in India.)

What common daily imagery could Jesus give to explain the growth of God’s rule? Yeast!

“God’s rule/kingdom is like a yeast which a woman takes and buries in three sata of flour and waits for it to leaven the entire batch” (Luke 13:20–21)

The oddity of this story was in the measure: three sata, plural of saton. This was the term the Greeks gave to the Hebrew seah. One saton/seah was nearly 7 kgs (or 16 pounds) of dry measure (i.e., 13.13 liters). In other words, this lady wasn’t preparing food for her household; she was turning 21 kgs or 47 lbs of flour into dough, enough to feed over a hundred people! She was a businesswoman, a shopkeeper. Everyone in the village would have known her – how she took nearly 50 pounds of flour and added a little yeast, left it to rise overnight, and early in the morning started to make freshly arisen sour-dough bread that would have captivated their senses through its smell.

For three sata of flour, she wouldn’t have used more than a few spoons of yeast. People knew that. That was how God’s rule would expand. It wouldn’t need hundreds of people to proclaim it, just twelve fearful disciples. The 2.38 billion Christians today and all the Christians of the previous twenty-one centuries believed because of the message of a few people who heard Jesus’s message, saw his miracles, and above all witnessed his resurrection to boldly sacrifice their lives, if necessary, to spread the word. God’s rule expanded worldwide with Peter, John, James, and a few others, including Paul, who were like yeasts in a large flour basket.

Even now, the Lord doesn’t need many people to bring about God’s rule in this world. He just needs a few committed people who would do the work faithfully.