Monday of the 17th
Week in Ordinary Time
July 28, 2014 8:30am
I have never made a loaf of bread
from scratch, kneading the dough with my hands and then letting it rise and all
that.
But I have made bread with a
bread machine – kind of the lazy man’s way, I guess.
But even that taught me something
about yeast or leaven.
As I remember, you put in several
cups of flour and some other ingredients, like water and salt.
But you only add a tablespoon or
so of yeast and that little bit of yeast eventually permeates all the dough and
makes it rise and turn into a good loaf of bread.
The interesting thing is that
when you look at it through the window of the bread machine, you see dough.
I would never say that I saw
yeast.
I saw dough.
But the yeast did the trick and
without it, I would get a lousy loaf of bread or maybe just some baked, dense
four.
Today, Jesus compares the kingdom
of heaven to the yeast that you mix with flour until the whole batch is
leavened.
The idea is that God’s presence,
God at work in the world, God at work in and through us may not be visible in
himself.
This means that we or what we do
may not have to be recognized or visible.
That may not be important.
But if we allow God to work in
and through us humbly, quietly, maybe invisibly and imperceptibly, well, the
kingdom of God is something like that.
We don’t have to worry about
being out there or dominant or visible or showy.
If we go about it in the way of
yeast within dough, that is the kingdom of God.
And the results will eventually be
there, as with the dough.
