Bread is the staple food in our part of the world - it's no surprise then that bread and yeast take on immense significance in the Bible's symbolism. This Easter Sunday, St Paul tells us to be "unleavened" by Sin - like the unleavened bread of the Passover and the Eucharist, yet Christ has also used the image of leaven to describe the Kingdom spreading throughout the world - we have to be unleavened by sin, but like the disciples this Easter morning, we also have to leaven the world with the Good News!
My first year studying theology, my third year in Rome, was cut suddenly and unexpectedly short. I had barely been following the news, but a strange and unheard-of respiratory virus was spreading rapidly in the North of Italy, with deadly consequences. On a Wednesday afternoon the civil authorities in Rome ordered all of their schools and universities to close. The Pontifical Universities followed suit, and they closed as well, provisionally for ten days. The Rector of the English College announced to us that evening that we were, if we so wanted, given permission to return home for those ten days - but that they would expect us all to come back if the universities then re-opened. After a few days it became clear that the university shutdown wasn’t going away any time soon, and it appeared travel in or out of Italy was about to become impossible, the permission you may go home became an order you must go home immediately. This was, of course, March 2020, and the beginning of a global pandemic.
So, quarantined in my parents’ house during a national lockdown, with nowhere to go other than a daily visit to the supermarket and a daily walk around Southampton common, and with only one of my classes transferring to online lectures, I started to get a little homesick for Rome. I found myself craving an authentic Carbonara, and real Roman Pizza, and watched hundreds of YouTube cooking videos. Having found a video purporting to offer a decent Pizza recipe, I quickly found my parents’ pantry lacked one key necessary ingredient: yeast.
I soon discovered that the first thing people in my area had panic bought was this miracle substance. There was no yeast anywhere to be found in any of the supermarkets. Each day I’d go out on my one government-permitted trip to the shops in search of yeast, and each day I’d come back empty-handed. Like, I gather, thousands of other people, I attempted to make my own yeast with a sourdough starter - before failing miserably and ordering a packet on amazon, which arrived in a sealed brown bag covered in Chinese writing, and a week after my initial cravings my parents and I finally had our pizza night!
Following my ill-fated attempts to find this magical leavening powder, I got seriously into bread baking - it started with pizza, then moved on to simple bread rolls, then white bloomers, then hot-cross buns. When the Vice-Rector of the Seminary made his daily video-call to check in on me during the lockdown, more often than not I’d have to tell him: sorry I can’t hold the phone up - I’m kneading dough and my hands are covered! Or I’d have just pulled the latest creation out of the oven!
When you start baking bread, you begin to realise exactly how important and how potent yeast is. A tiny teaspoon, mixed with a little sugar in warm water, is enough to make a whole loaf rise and quadruple in size. A good yeast is indispensable. But by the same account, a bad yeast can ruin everything. Add dead yeast to your batter and nothing will happen - you get no rise at all and your bread will be as flat as a pancake. Yeast is delicate as well - too hot or too cold, or expose it to something like salt, and it dies - with no way of saving it. Fr David Bateman, when he was visiting us last summer, made the mistake when we went to the supermarket of packing my tin of yeast in the same bag as the frozen vegetables - by the time we’d got home the yeast was frozen and good only to be thrown out.
Because bread is such a staple food in our part of the world, Yeast has a funny place in the bible, and it’s very often used as a metaphor for something else. More often than not, yeast is used as a metaphor for something bad, a metaphor for sin. Saint Paul is certainly using it in that sense in our second reading today: You must know how even a small amount of yeast is enough to leaven all the dough, so get rid of all the old yeast, and make yourself into a completely new batch of bread, unleavened as you are meant to be. He talks about the yeast of evil and wickedness. Cast out Sin, he’s saying, because like a small amount of yeast in a bread batter, a small amount of sin gets everywhere and multiplies and has a powerful and profound effect. We are meant to be a flat-bread, like the bread of the Passover, or the bread of the Eucharist, not leavened by sin.
And yet, in at least one instance, the yeast is used as a positive image: Jesus says the kingdom is like a woman mixing yeast into three measures of flour. Just like the small amount of yeast causes the bread to rise, the little seed of the Church planted in the world gets everywhere and causes the Kingdom to grow. In this sense our Gospel today is an example of a good kind of leavening - as the news spreads of Jesus’ resurrection: Mary Magdalen runs to tell Peter, Peter and John go running to the tomb to see and find that it was empty, soon the other eleven will find out the news, if there was an evening Mass we’d read the Gospel of two more disciples on the road to Emmaus meeting Jesus and running back to tell the Good News. From this little spoonful of yeast, this handful of disciples, the word of Jesus resurrection spread around the whole world, until today when some 2 ½ billion people profess to have some kind of faith in Christ.
We are an Easter people, called to be unleavened, which means uncontaminated by the Old Yeast of sin and death that was destroyed by the death of Christ, but also called to be a leaven for the whole world - spreading the Good News proclaimed in our Easter Sequence: the Sheep have been ransomed by the lamb, and Christ has reconciled us to the Father. Even a small amount of yeast is enough to leaven the whole dough, even a few Christian believers, proclaiming the Good News in all it's truth and all it's joy is enough to leaven the whole world with the new life of Christ, until every knee bends and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord.
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