St. Joseph of the Lakes

Jesus spoke to them another parable.
"The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour
until the whole batch was leavened."

Those of you who, like me, enjoy baking bread realize that this little parable from Jesus says much more than its face value. As Jesus gives us his recipe for wheat bread, he speaks of using three measures of wheat flour being mixed with yeast. (Not sure what a “measure” is, the biblical resources I have give varying English measurement equivalencies of it.)  In Jesus’ day there was nothing like Fleischmann’s granulated dried yeast. So it is hard to exactly know how much yeast would be mixed with the measures of wheat. However, the best equivalency we would have would be found with those who enjoy making sourdough bread. They will use a “starter” of fermented bread dough which they mix with the flour and water creating a new dough which then begins to ferment itself. Before they make loaves from the risen dough, they will cut off a piece of the dough to save for the next batch of dough to be made. This was the common way to make any kind of yeast bread until the mid-1800’s. It is only after that time we would begin to talk of using less than a teaspoon of yeast mixed in three to four cups of flour to make bread dough.

In the more ancient case of making yeast bread the equivalencies to using Fleischmann’s yeast are pretty compatible. Although individual yeast cells were not identified until 1680, when Dutch naturalist Anton van Leeuwenhoek first microscopically observed yeast; archeologists have observed containers and bakery plans of the ancients going back 4000 years. The ancients might not have known what an individual cell of yeast looked like, they knew how it acted and how to use it to their advantage. They had worked out how much of a “starter” needed to be added to fresh dough to make the bread rise. It did not take much then, nor does it today. It was a small amount of the “mother” dough that would raise a huge batch of bread to be baked and enjoyed.

We have an advantage in our present age when we recognize the agent that causes the bread to rise. It is a microscopic organism (in the fungus family) that consumes the sugars in the wheat and expels carbon dioxide which is trapped in the gluten structure of the dough. These are the little bubbles that form the crumb of the bread. What a huge difference that little bit of “mother dough” (full of living yeast cells) makes in the taste and texture of the lump of dough made by mixing water and flour. Our advantage is to realize how small the organism is that makes all the difference for the making of bread.

It gives me great encouragement to realize that Jesus is telling us that just a small dose of the kingdom of God changes everything it touches. As we get closer to our parish festival, we, who are members of the Kingdom of God, will have an opportunity to touch the many visitors who will be joining us. God will do amazing things through us!