One of the reasons people loved to listen to Jesus was that he talked about things they knew about, scenes and events from their everyday lives. But the lives of the people Jesus talked to can seem very far away from our own, sometimes. His illustrations don’t always mean that much to us.
What’s a Pharisee to you? To me? Have you ever seen a Pharisee? Does the word make you remember that time last week when you had a run-in with a Pharisee, so that when you hear the story you can immediately identify with what Jesus is about to say? Probably not.
And what about yeast? Do you bake bread? I do, so yeast is familiar to me. You buy it at the store in sets of three little packets, Fleischman’s or Red Star, which you can store on the shelf for months. When you want to bake bread you just open the packet and add warm water, and presto! the bread rises. We all know about yeast, right? Wrong. The yeast the people of Palestine used is more like sourdough. How many of you have ever made sourdough bread? It’s a lot harder to use, and a lot harder to take care of. It’s a culture made of fermenting grain that most people nowadays keep in the refrigerator, because when it spoils it’s really foul. I have no idea how the people in Jesus’ day kept their yeast safe. In the Bible it’s used as a symbol of corruption because just a little of it can spread so far.
But if the details of people’s lives have changed a lot from Jesus’ day to this, the people themselves have not. We’re just the same kinds of folks they were back then. And we have the same kinds of problems, and the same sorts of faults, and we need to hear exactly the same lessons. So what we’re going to do is move Jesus and his disciples forward 2,000 years, to a Bible study over at the U.
It’s an open-air Bible study; they moved outside because it’s one of those rare Minnesota spring afternoons between blizzard and mosquito time. Jesus is on a roll, the kids are really connecting with what he has to say, and a lot of new people have gathered, to find out what’s going on, and stayed to listen. After a while, a couple of hecklers decide to start giving Jesus a hard time. “Why should we follow you instead of Buddha?” one calls. “Yeah,” says another, “or Mohammed.” A third voice chimes in, “My spirit guide says all ways lead to God if you’re sincere.” The mood of the crowd begins to change. A girl in the front row says, “That’s right; what matters is if it’s true for you.” The first student pushes to the front and says again, more insistently, “Why should we listen to you? Can you prove you’re right?”
Jesus looks at him silently for a moment, then shakes his head. “I won’t waste my breath,” he said. And to his disciples, “We’re done here for today. Pack up your stuff.”
In the van, on their way down to Red Wing, Jesus says, “Be careful of getting infected by those scoffers.”
And the disciples begin to discuss among themselves what Jesus meant. “They didn’t look sick to me,” says one. “Do you suppose he meant AIDS?” asks another. “I don’t think so,” disagrees a third, “Jesus knows we don’t do drugs or sleep around.” “Maybe he means the flu,” says the first. “There’s been a lot of that going around this year, and we’ve got too much to do; we can’t afford to get sick.” “Maybe we should go in for flu shots,” suggests another.
Jesus listened to all of this and said, “Why are you talking about getting sick? Don’t you get it? Weren’t you listening? Does everything that goes on around you just go in one ear and out the other? Have you gotten sick once since you’ve been with me?”
“No, we haven’t,” admits one.
“And do you remember last week, when that woman brought me her baby with the ear infection, what happened?”
“You touched her ear and she stopped screaming,” said the one who had suggested flu shots.
“And you still think I’m worried about your getting sick?” Jesus shakes his head. “When are you guys ever going to get it?”
They missed the point, didn’t they? Jesus’ disciples missed the main point entirely. Why?
Three things got in the way of their getting the message.
First, they were easily distracted. Second, they focused on the superficial. And third, they forgot about what Jesus had already done.
Let’s go back two thousand years, and look again at Mark’s account. What had the disciples been doing? They had been accompanying Jesus, learning from him, watching people flock to him by the hundreds and thousands, and had just witnessed an argument between their leader and some of the chief opinion-makers of their day. You’d think they’d be interested in what had just happened. This was significant. The Pharisees were really important. They were the religious big-wigs, the scholars and teachers and writers; they were THE authorities on Scripture and sin and God how to be a good Jew. And yet Jesus brushed them off. Jesus not only brushed them off, he insulted them. You’d think the disciples would notice. And yet when Jesus gives them a warning, the disciples latch onto probably the least important word in the whole sentence and go haring off on a metaphorical wild-goose chase. Jesus mentions yeast and they start thinking about dinner.
Imagine being in a business meeting. Your boss has just completed laying out the long-term strategy for growing the company into the next decade. He closes with a motivational speech about developing a good defense against the firm’s competitors. And the entire room takes off on a discussion of the Vikings’ new defensive strategy and their chances of making it to the Super-bowl. Not good, right? They’ve just told the boss they weren’t really listening.
It’s so easy to fly off on a tangent. Have you ever done it? Do you ever find your mind picking up on a chance remark and flying off into something totally unrelated to the current discussion? It happens to me. It happens to you. It happens to us all. What’s important is, when does it happen? The answer is important because you don’t get distracted when something really matters to you.
Something was more important to the disciples, just then, than Jesus.
What matters to you?
The second thing that kept the disciples from understanding what Jesus meant was the fact that they focused on the superficial. Even if they’d stuck to the subject, which was the encounter with the Pharisees, they were still dealing only with the surface. They didn’t ask themselves, “Why would Jesus refer to yeast when talking about Herod and the Pharisees?” Remember, the disciples had been traveling with Jesus for a long time. They should have been used to the way Jesus talked. He often used parables and metaphors and colorful language to explain things of the spirit. And He always cared more about people’s insides than their outsides. But they didn’t bother to think. They just reacted.
Remember, these were people for whom Herod and Pharisees were part of their lives. If I were to say to you, “Don’t be infected by the New Age,” or “Don’t catch the Jihadi disease,” you would have some idea of what I’m talking about. You should be able to guess that I’m talking about an attitude, a frame of mind, that is contagious.
What did Herod and the Pharisees have in common? One commentator that I read suggests that the issue is unbelief, that what Jesus is talking about is the fact that neither one believed in Jesus. And I agree. But I think it goes deeper than that. Both were people who didn’t want to believe in Jesus. Both had a lot to lose, if Jesus were who they feared he was. So they asked the question, “Who are you?” and hoped the answer was, “Nobody you need to worry about.” You see, Herod was greedy, immoral, and self-indulgent... and Jesus threatened his comfortable life-style. And the Pharisees were molders of public opinion, guardians of religious prestige. If Jesus were telling the truth, they’d lose their positions of influence, honor and status. They didn’t want to believe, but were afraid they ought to. So they kept asking... not for reasons to believe, but for reasons to disbelieve.
Honest doubt is acceptable to God; many - if not most - of us seek help from God from time to time to strengthen a shaken faith. But this is not the same as daring God to prove himself to you. The yeast of the Pharisees and of Herod corrupts honest doubt into hostile challenge. The yeast of the Pharisees is willful estrangement from the righteousness of God for the sake of hanging on to their own righteousness. And to make it even worse, the Pharisees cloaked their opposition to Jesus in a display of public morality.
But the disciples don’t understand Jesus’ warning, because they don’t look under the surface. They don’t look under the surface either of the Pharisees or of themselves. Do you examine your heart as often as you examine your behavior? Your relationship to Jesus is the basis for your actions; what kind of relationship is it? Think about it.
And finally, the disciples didn’t understand what Jesus meant because they forgot what he had already done. They focused on the superficial, took off on a tangent, and then worried about it because they didn’t connect what Jesus had done in the past with what Jesus could do in the future. Part of the reason we come to church is to remind ourselves of what God has done in the past. We come and tell the stories, story after story after story of how God has restored individuals and communities after seeming disaster. We hear of Joseph, sold into slavery by his own brothers, becoming the most powerful man in Egypt and saving the same brothers who had betrayed him from starvation. We hear of Moses, exiled and forgotten, being called to lead the people of God. We hear of Naomi, widowed and embittered, restored to her homeland and given a child. We hear of David, persecuted and exiled by a jealous Saul, building a kingdom his descendants still remember. We hear of Mary, the little Galilean girl whom people all over the world still revere for her faithfulness and obedience. We hear the greatest story of them all, of the child born in an obscure corner on the fringes of the Roman empire who gave his life that we might be restored to God. Neither his death nor his life are forgotten, and his servants who remembered him and who walked with him into the future changed the world.
We come to remember, and to praise, because it is the witness of the past that makes us certain of God’s power for tomorrow.
The disciples had seen Jesus feed the multitudes. They had seen Jesus heal the sick. They had seen Jesus give sight to the blind, cast out demons, and walk on water. And yet they were worried about what they were going to eat for dinner. And Jesus shook his head at them. “You still don’t get it,” he said. “You just don’t get it.”
Do you get it? Do you know what Jesus can do?
The message of this lesson in the book of Mark is that there is nothing that Jesus cannot do. But we can only get the message if we don’t let ourselves be distracted by trivia, and if our relationship with God is healthy.
What is God doing in this church? Do not say, we are too poor, we are too small. What God can do with a faithful remnant is more than an army of Pharisees can do. If Jesus could feed the 5,000 with five loaves and as many fish, what kind of a community do you suppose Jesus can build up from the people sitting here in the pews today? If you have Jesus, you have everything you need. And if Jesus has you, he will make you what he needs you to be.
Do you get it? Do you get the message?
Remember what God has done, for you, for people you know, through the witness of history, through the testimony of Scripture. Stop and ask yourselves, “What is impossible for God?”
Look inside yourself. What is your relationship with Jesus like? Do you belong to him fully? Does he have your permission to make you into his kind of person? If there is something stopping you, make a decision to give it up. Tell God he has your permission to remove whatever it is from your life and from your heart.
And then check out your attention span. What distracts you from Jesus and his mission and his message? What catches you? Does Jesus have your attention? Or does something else matter more?
Do you get it?
