In our day and age baking bread requires yeast or leaven. However, we get our yeast from the store. For the people of Jesus’ time, whenever the woman of the house baked bread, she would save a little of the unbaked dough to use in the next batch. She would put it in a dark corner until it was needed. It would continue to ferment until it was used. The process would start over again when she made the next batch of bread dough. So for the people of Jesus’ time, yeast or leaven stands for something old and fermented or corrupt. At Passover, all the old leaven would be thrown away making it necessary to start with something totally new.
When Jesus references the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod, he is speaking of the old way of looking at things, at the old way of doing things. Jesus represents something totally new. So he is asking the disciples to look at what he is doing and saying from a new point of view, to set aside the old and embrace the new.
As he continues, he emphasizes that if they open their hearts to his words and to his deeds, they will find that they are never in need, that there is more than enough to go around.
In our own day and age, we tend to store up things, constantly acquiring more than we really need. As a people we have lived through or have learned about times of want and deprivation, such as the time of the Great Depression in the early part of the last century. People who lived during that time bore the scars of the Depression. They seemed to look at life, focusing on the things they lacked rather than upon the many signs of God’s love that fill our lives. As we listen to the words of the Gospel today, let us open our hearts and realize that God has given us all that we need. Let us express our gratitude for all the signs of God’s love that surround us.
Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator