17 - Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII THE LEAVEN Mat 13:33; Luk 13:20 f. OUR Lord watches a woman baking the family bread; he notes how the yeast lays itself alongside the flour and, by a process of transforming influence, moulds it into a new creation. He marks how the yeast works gradually, powerfully, inevitably, passing from grain to grain of the flour, changing the nature of all it touches.
“ That,” said Jesus, “ is how the Kingdom of God grows.”
There is here the same trust in God, the same confident belief in the future of the Kingdom, that we found in the Mustard Seed. But there is a new idea, the idea of an irresistible force, subduing to its will all that it meets, bringing within its sphere of influence ever new individuals, new groups, new spheres of thought, new departments of life; giving us new creatures, a new Covenant, new heavens and a new earth. The forces of the Kingdom, then, are to work by their own inherent influence; men are to be induced, not compelled, to wear its uniform. The ideals of the Kingdom are to be gladly accepted, not thrust upon us. The communism of the early Jerusalem Church was not the fiat of an organisation but a spontaneous outburst of Christian giving. Ananias and Sapphira were at perfect liberty to retain the whole proceeds of the sale of their property had they so chosen.
Slaves were not to demand their freedom, but to wait till their masters learned a more excellent way. In all our thought of the evangelisation of the world, we have a tendency to picture as the main force at work officially appointed missionaries using the official agencies of sermons, schools, hospitals and the printing press. It may be doubted if this is how Christianity ever has spread in any large community beyond the initial stages. In any case it is not the way of the parable, which pictures the new religion as having within itself its own expansive force; or, if we may so put it, the lives of Christian people as the supreme missionary force.
History has confirmed both the justice of our Lord’s faith in the expansive power of the Kingdom and the wisdom of his method. During the last century we have seen one fortress after another of entrenched wrong crumble before the spread of Christian ideas. The British in India have sometimes been blamed by Indians for not adopting more drastic methods in dealing with the moral sores of that country; yet on the whole the leavening principle has worked effectively, if slowly. It has been recognized that legislation itself has a certain educative effect; but the general policy has been to suppress no social evil till public opinion was sufficiently advanced to see the wisdom of the move. Thus suttee, the murder of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre, is now unknown except in sporadic cases.
If the use of images still plays a large part in the religion of the masses, idolatry has largely lost its hold over the minds of the educated. At last we see the beginning even of the recognition as human beings of those we now euphemistically call the depressed classes. The measure in which we use compulsion is the measure of our unbelief. The lesson of the parable is that truth, once it gets a grip, has sufficient vitality in itself to spread. In our own country, more perhaps than in any other, in our social and political life, with a few terrible exceptions even in our religious life, the instrument of persuasion has been the leaven rather than the legal code or the sword. In the new India, Mr. Gandhi has told us, he will welcome our Christian hospitals and agencies for social uplift, but not our Christian propaganda. It may be that Christian charity, to exercise its full missionary power, requires an explanatory commentary; but surely Mr. Gandhi underestimates the attractive power of the Christian life as much as he overestimates the persuasive power of the Christian word. The Hindu, like the Pharisee of our Lord’s time, believes that uncleanness, by which they both mean ceremonial uncleanness, is contagious, that it passes with destructive effect from man to man, from man to object, from object to man. Our Lord had no fear of such contagion, had no doctrine of untouchability. In contact with the leper, the woman of the city, the woman with the hasmorrhage, far from being defiled by their defilement he made the unclean clean.
“ Till the whole has been leavened.” Does this phrase simply complete the story of the baking operations, or does it point to a time when in every corner of the world, in every region of thought and life, Jesus Christ will reign?
One would like to believe it; but with the Darnel, the Great Supper and the Vinedressers among the parables, we cannot say it is the teaching of Jesus. Man has the terrible power of saying, ’ I pray thee have me excused.” “ Lord, are there few that be saved? ’ “ Strive ye to enter in at the strait gate.”