Heaven's Leaven

by Jessica Prentice
March 1, 2003

I am baking bread. I mix my leaven into meal that I have made from water and flour. The flour is coarse, almost more like cracked wheat than flour, even though I ground it twice. It is hard work grinding grain, even just a few cups worth. But the smell of freshly ground flour is wonderful -- rich, redolent of life and of eons of time: of women crouching over mortars and pestles, of a horse-drawn mill: two huge stones rubbing together, pulverizing the wheat berries, filling barrels with flour.

It is a smell we rarely smell, nowadays. But I wonder if, in the time of Jesus, in the time of Luke, in the time when this parable was uttered, it wasn't a familiar part of daily life. Something everyone took for granted.

And what about the smell of leaven, a completely different smell altogether: sour, yeasty, slightly fermented? Perhaps it was sitting in an earthenware jar on a ledge somewhere, keeping warm in the sun? The woman in the biblical verse would certainly smell it before mixing it with her meal, maybe poke at it with her finger or a spoon, to see how active it was, how ripe, how ready to work its magic. She would know how to tell, by smelling it, by touching it, because she would have smelled and touched it many times over the years, would have kneaded it into countless loaves of bread, which would have been eaten, each one thankfully, by her hungry family - some warm out of the oven, some after many days of travel in a sack slung from a donkey, but still rich and good and nourishing.

My leaven is like hers probably was: sour and yeasty, a little bit bubbly. It stays in a small ceramic crock, most of the time in the fridge. This is because I don't bake bread that often, and the warmer it is, the more tending it needs. In the cold of the fridge the fermentation process slows way down, so it can sit there for a week or more without being fed more flour and water. When I am ready to use it, I put it in a warm spot to get it active again, feed it more flour and water, and let it ferment. The woman in the biblical verse probably baked bread more often than I, and so maybe kept her starter warm all the time. Or maybe she had a cool cellar, or a well or cistern, or a hole dug in the ground, where she kept things like meat and milk cool enough to last a few days. Maybe she put her leaven there to slow it down.

Some translators translate the greek word zumh ("zume") as "yeast", and indeed it is. But it is not the commercial yeast we find in small packages in our grocery store -- this was only developed in the 1800s. Until then, bread was made with a natural leaven made up of wild yeasts -- microorganisms that can be harvested from the environment by mixing together flour and water and keeping it at the right temperature in the right place for the right period of time. Careful control over these factors will favor the desirable microorganisms, and discourage the ones you don't want. Once a good leaven has been made, it can be kept indefinitely by taking care of it, feeding it flour and water, and using it to bake.

Such natural leaven is now often referred to as 'sourdough,' but it can be used to make bread that is either noticeably sour or not. Many breads use commercial yeast to leaven the bread and then add 'sourdough' to give a sour flavor but not for leavening. But the woman in Jesus' parable was using a natural, wild-yeast leaven to raise her bread.

Many of the microorganisms used to leaven bread are in the Lactobacilii family, and there is even a microorganism named Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis, which is associated with the famous San Francisco sourdough. The microorganisms involved in alcoholic fermentation are a different family (Saccharomyces), though many beers (most notably the Belgian Lambic) make use of Lactobacilii as well, giving the beer a sour flavor.

Though we now understand much about the microbiology involved in natural fermentation, in ancient cultures fermentation was seen as magical and mystical. Gods of fermentation (such as Dionysus) or unseen spirits were sometimes considered responsible for the mysterious actions of invisible microorganisms.

For my part, no amount of scientific understanding can make it less mysterious, magical, or sacred to watch flour and water become bread. And it is not something I can do without thinking about Jesus' parable. As I mix my leaven into the flour-and-water meal, in a ratio of approximately1:3, I am struck by the power of doing a thing, a simple daily action, that cuts across millennia. And I am pushed to wonder about the message of that parable, and why Jesus likens the Kingdom of God to that sour, yeasty, bubbly mass I pour out of the crock.

I wonder what it is about the leaven that Jesus is comparing to the Kingdom of God. Is it the quality of felicitous, contagious spreading? The way just a tablespoon of leaven can take over a cup of dough in just a few hours, turning the whole thing into leaven? Is Jesus referring to this kind of uncontrollable, organic, exponential growth? Or is it a reference to the magic and mystery of the process, that it is something that we can't see with the naked eye, can't easily measure, quantify, or capture, or even understand, but that is nevertheless completely real and true and potent? Or does the message have something to do with the 'hiding' of the leaven, that it is something that is buried, unseen, but still active, alive, and doing its work? Or is it the everyday quality of the act, the making of the daily bread, the humbleness of it all combined with the magic and mystery, that makes it like the Kingdom of God?

In many ancient cultures, fermentation is treated with a kind of respect and awe that is almost religious in quality. One writer notes: "this kind of reverence pervades indigenous and older societies. Each life-form, whether a cactus, stone, or yeast, is viewed as an expression of the sacred, with its own intelligence, awareness, and sacred nature." While Christianity is often seen as the antithesis of this kind of mystical understanding of nature, as well as an oppressor of peoples who practiced it, I find in many of Jesus' words and teachings more than a hint of this kind of mysticism. Perhaps the Kingdom of God is like to leaven because leaven is alive and sacred, because leaven has its own intelligence that is in itself an expression of God.

Or maybe it is simply that the Kingdom of God is something that lifts us up, that brings lightness to our being, that pushes us heavenward.

The mysteriousness of Jesus' message in the Parable of the Leaven fascinates me, and reminds me of the mystery of leavening itself. Perhaps that itself is the true message: like the Kingdom of God, it is something we can marvel at, and experience, and know to be true, but in the end it is and always will be a mystery.