“Meanwhile, the crowds grew until thousands were milling about and stepping on each other. Jesus turned first to his disciples and warned them, “Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees—their hypocrisy. The time is coming when everything that is covered up will be revealed, and all that is secret will be made known to all. Whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be shouted from the housetops for all to hear!” Luke 12:1-3 NLT
Crowds as thick as a rock concert in Central Park. Did I ever notice that Jesus was looking over the throngs of people when he delivered this famous passage? No. He sees thousands out there and says, watch out for “leaven infection.” Sure, leaven is yeast as New Living Translation says, but I can’t use that word coupled with infection!
Yeasts are single-celled microorganisms classified as members of the fungus kingdom! YIKES 🤢. Let’s just stick to its properties in food.
Yeast is used in baking as a leavening agent, where it converts the food/fermentable sugars present in dough into the gas carbon dioxide. This causes the dough to expand or rise as gas forms pockets or bubbles. When the dough is baked, the yeast dies and the air pockets “set”, giving the baked product a soft and spongy texture. Yeast also rapidly reproduces, effectively permeating every cell of the dough.
Why was yeast (leaven) associated with sin? First, on a practical level, the Israelites had to be ready to leave Egypt at a moment’s notice and thus they couldn’t wait for the dough to rise. Second, leaven in the Bible is symbolic of sin and deceit. Leaven, a picture of sin, makes the bread inflate. The visual is that sin makes one prideful and puffed-up. Plus, it only takes a very small amount of fermented dough to make new dough rise (Gal 5:9), thus the idea that fermentation implies a process of corruption. Yeast or leaven is NOT sin! It’s just an object lesson.
Jesus looks over this massive crowd and finds a few Pharisees among them. Effectively saying, “it only takes one” bad 🍎 to infect this entire crowd. The Pharisees message of weaponizing the Law of God to keep people from God is a deadly fungus that kills! Plus the fact that people that say they believe one thing but practice another are a hypocritical joke.
Yes, everyone at some point is a hypocrite, but no one should be an activist about it. Jesus warns – ALL SECRETS will be known! God will pull back the cover of darkness over all humankind and expose everything. I can’t, you can’t hide sin forever 😬. So what’s Jesus point? Well, the biggest one is don’t be a SIN ACTIVIST, publicly parading about proudly mocking God himself. You’d just be behaving like a fungus, socially infecting everyone around you. Two, the light of world, Jesus, will shine on every human heart and expose everything.
Prayer
Dad,
Whoa, I see what you did here with the Pharisees, religious leaders of the day. I understand that I could easily see you exposes their thoughts and deeds and just be happy for a bit of justice for all the misery they (and those like them today) have caused. But I know how this works. I also need to see myself. My heart. My deeds. And when I think of all the times I try to get away with sin by being sneaky, or covering up, leaving no bodies to be found – that I’ve “gotten away with it,” the Holy Spirit arrests me on the spot! I then confess, repent, and turn from my sin. I WANT my sin covered, not by darkness but by the blood of Jesus that cleans me and makes me whole!