There is another parable that goes even farther. (Jesus' teaching builds up in intensity and depth as he goes along.) This is the parable of the leaven hidden in the dough. This parable is exactly the same in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and goes like this:

The Kingdom of God is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened. (Matt. 13:33)

In Jesus' time, leaven was a lively symbol of corruption. Leaven was made by allowing a piece of bread to rot in a dark, damp place until it stank. Then you put the rotten bread in the dough until the dough was permeated by it. The juxtaposition of leavened and unleavened bread was another way in which the religious society of the time expressed the importance of separating the sacred from the secular, the feast day from everyday life.

The woman in the parable takes three measures of flour. This amount is enough to feed about fifty people--so, we are not talking about a modest meal that the woman is preparing; we're talking about enough to feed a small army! Three measures of flour are the same measure that we hear about in Genesis, when Sarah provides bread at Abraham's request for the three angelic visitors at the Oaks of Mamre. Thus in the minds of the hearers of the parable, the number suggests that a special revelation of God is taking place.

Yet, in the parable, instead of being an epiphany of holiness, the batch of leavened bread becomes a revelation of corruption. As a result, the hearers of the parable would have been left wondering: "Is this man saying that good is evil? How can he propose that leaven, especially after it leavens a whole mass of dough, is a revelation of the Kingdom of God? He should say just the opposite." If leavened bread, as we have seen, was the popular symbol of corruption, fifty loaves must have suggested corruption on a monumental scale.

The parable clearly raises the question: How do we know what is good and what is evil? Such a question presupposes that one has a value system. And it is our value system that Jesus is confronting in this parable: we may need to doubt the reliability of what we feel is good and evil. As we have seen, the Kingdom of God is not limited to sacred places. God feels free to come to us in any guise whatsoever. The Kingdom of God is present is daily life when events that we consider disasters occur. God is never absent--it is just our belief system that makes us think that God could not be present when things, according to our judgment, go wrong.

The Parable of the Leaven suggests that God is never more present than when things are going wrong. The leaven, symbol of what we regard as evil for us, could be physical, mental, or moral disabilities in us or in those we love. Jesus teaches that the Kingdom of God is present there; just how it is present is what we have to figure out.

This is the challenge of everyday life. God is always there, but everything in us may say: "God can't be here." Or we may ask, "If God is all merciful and all powerful, why is he allowing this to happen to me?" As symbolized by the enormous batch of leavened bread, what we may be feeling is massive corruption! "Where is Jesus?" we may ask? "Where is God, who is always saying how much he loves me and protects me? God.... Do something!"

What God is looking for is not to change situations that seem horrendously destructive or corrupt. He is hoping to change us. Changing us may sometimes require disasters. We have preconceived ideas that have never been challenged, mindsets that we have brought with us from early childhood or picked up along the way. Most, if not all, of these values are not those of the Gospel! God invites us to change them; and, if we cannot do it on our own, he provides us with circumstances that may seem to us insurmountable or overwhelming.

St. Thérèse  had this kind of trouble. First, she developed tuberculosis that grew worse as her life in the Lisieux Carmel convent unfolded. She was virtually bedridden during the last year of her life. She could not praise God at the divine office anymore; she could not attend daily Mass; she could not even think of heaven that had previously been so great a consolation for her. Heaven, she felt, was closed to her--as if there were an iron curtain in front of it whenever she tried to think about it. In other words, her painful disease and her spiritual purification were going on at the same time.

Sometimes three or four corruptions are going on at the same time! You may have physical, mental, moral and spiritual evils going on all at once. When people undergo these things, they need all the support we can give them because they are really hurting. But, we should ask, is it only physical, mental, moral, or spiritual corruption that we feel? Is the experience of intense suffering the only reality?

Christ's passion, death, and resurrection are being worked out in us through the events of daily life, that is, through what happens. His resurrection is at the bottom of whatever the pile of corruption may be, and in due time it will emerge. The cross and resurrection are two sides of the same reality While we sometimes experience one more than the other, in the mature Christian they come together. It does not matter which is predominant, because the other is always present.

Let us look at the situation from God's point of view. Here is God, sending into the world his only Son, who, as St. Paul says, "became sin for us." In other words, Jesus took upon himself all the consequences of our sinfulness on the cross. The chief consequences are: the sense of God's absence, the sense of alienation from God, and, at times, even the feeling of rejection by God.

We are identified with Christ less by our virtues than by our sins. It is our sinfulness and weakness that Christ has taken upon himself; all the consequences of personal sin, symbolized by his descent into hell. The Greek Orthodox liturgy of Holy Saturday affirms that Christ truly descended into the place of the damned.

Hell is primarily a state of mind, a state of soul, a state characterized by total alienation from God so total that one does not even want to have it changed! Hell exists even in this life for people who endure unbearable mental suffering. One who is experiencing total alienation from God cannot think of anything else. One is totally immersed in one's sense of desolation, loneliness, and reprobation. This is precisely the extent to which Christ has identified with us. By identifying with all the consequences of our sins and taking the suffering of the whole of humanity into himself, Christ descended into that state of consciousness that corresponds to hell--or more exactly, is hell.

To participate in that kind of absence or alienation from God is the most powerful and mature identity with Jesus that one can come to in the Christian life. That is why it is a mistake to think of our spiritual journey as an ascent to glory or as a magic carpet to bliss. It is rather the increasing capacity to enter into Christ's passion, death, descent into hell, and resurrection. That is the greatest participation in Christ's Paschal Mystery, and hence the foundation for the greatest participation in his resurrection. It is also the greatest participation in the redemption of the world, which is the great project that Jesus initiated and achieved in his own humanity and now invites us to share. Thérèse accepted this invitation with her whole heart, writing toward the end of her life: "Suffering through love is the one thing that seems desirable to me in this vale of tears."

Continued Next Week

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Excerpted from St. Thérèse of Lisieux by Fr. Thomas Keating

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