Pentecost 9 – 2026
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-58
Marian Free
In the name of God whose creative power operates out of sight and in extraordinary ways. Amen.
I wonder what image do you have in your head when you hear “the kingdom of God” or if you have an image at all? Maybe your mind goes to Revelation 21 – to a city adorned with every jewel through which runs the river of life, which has on every side trees providing fruit for every month and leaves for healing. A place in which death, mourning and crying will be no more? Or perhaps you imagine the images in Isaiah of deserts blooming, hills and mountains singing, of full harvests and banquets with plentiful food or of swords beaten into plough shares.
I confess that I’m not entirely sure that I have tried to visualize the kingdom of heaven and that if I did it would have been an idealistic image of a perfect society – a place in which everyone is happy, everyone has a home and enough to eat, a place in which there is no war, no crime, and in which governments have the best interests of their people at heart.
As we have studied the parables these last three weeks, I’ve had to re-consider and to ask what it is that Jesus actually saying here? I am clear that the kingdom is not the same as heaven and that the kingdom parables are speaking of the kingdom of God breaking into the present. What I have learnt over the past three weeks is that the kingdom of God to which Jesus alludes is not, as we often imagine, God’s working among us to create some perfect, ideal society future but rather it is the presence of God in the midst of all the messiness and imperfection of our present existence – a presence which accepts the way things are, is not trying to force us to be what we are not, but which is loving us into what we could be.
For example, we learn through the parables that the sower continues to sow the seed – on all sorts of soil, the good, the bad and the indifferent. The weeds are allowed to remain in the midst of the wheat. That which is not perfect is not rooted out, the infertile soil is not improved so that it will be responsive to the seed. The sower allows the seed to fall where it will, no matter the state of the soil and the farmer is confident that the wheat and the weeds will be able grow together without the wheat coming to harm.
The parable of the yeast makes this point even more strongly though its meaning is not obvious to our 21stcentury ears.
Yeast as you may know is a fungus, a contaminant. Anyone who has ever made bread knows that the fermenting yeast both looks and smells unpleasant. It is almost impossible to envisage the smelly, bubbly mess turning into anything we would want to eat, let alone a warm loaf of delicious bread. In the first century, the starter for bread was an old piece of leavened dough. It would have looked and smelt disgusting. People did not need to know that it was a fungus to consider it to be unclean, a source of corruption and contamination. It was for this reason that leavened bread was not eaten at all during Passover and that all homes were completely stripped of any trace of leaven before the feast. Yeast as a symbol of corruption is referred to by Jesus who tells the disciples to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees (Matthew 16:6) and by Paul who writes to the Corinthians telling them to cleanse out the old leaven (1 Corinthians 5:7).
Yeast was, you might say, a necessary evil. Yet here Jesus can say: “the kingdom of heaven is like yeast!”
That alone would have been confronting enough for Jesus’ audience, but there is more. As Dominic Albaria points out there are two other unexpected, shocking elements to this parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a womantook!” Jesus has made a woman God’s agent. In Jesus’ time women had no role in the religious life of the community, no voice and no legal rights, yet Jesus elevates a woman to a role which facilitates God’s kingdom. Finally, in a culture which valued openness and in which nothing good happened in secret, the transformative work of the yeast happens in the dark, in secret![1] Yeast is good, women can do God’s work and darkness is not all bad!
In so many ways, this one sentence parable would have unsettled every one of Jesus’ listeners. In effect he is saying that the unclean, the impure, and the immoral not only belong to, but are essential to the growth of the kingdom and that things that are hidden in darkness are not of necessity bad! The parable has the power to shock and surprise even us and to make us re-think all that we thought we knew about the kingdom and, dare I say, all that we thought we knew about God.
Alongside the parable of the sower and the weeds, the parable of the yeast reveals the inclusive nature of the kingdom. No one is excluded from the kingdom, no one, that is no one, is beyond the reach of God’s love. That means that the kingdom, whatever it may be, is not made up solely of the good, the pious and the pure, but includes the bad, the flawed, the damaged, the corrupted and corruptible and, more shocking still, the bad, the flawed, the damaged, the corrupted and the corruptible may in fact contribute to the growth of the kingdom.
Heard in this way, the parables of the kingdom tell us that it is not our place to determine who is in and who is out, remind us to be grateful that we, with our own imperfections are included in the kingdom and insist that we extend God’s loving welcome to all people without question and without exception because they will change us as much as we might hope to change them.
The kingdom of God is like yeast – it is a smelly, disgusting, contaminate – but it is also transformative in ways we cannot begin to imagine.
[1] https://www.fermataministries.com/post/when-god-uses-what-we-reject-the-parable-of-the-yeast
Tags: kingdom of heaven, inclusivity, yeast, contaminate
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