By: Dave Sims
Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod. (Mark 8:15 NIV)
After Jesus had fed the 4000, he and his men crossed over the Sea of Galilee. In route, someone noticed they had forgotten to bring bread. As he often did, Jesus turned the conversation into an object lesson and as usual, he started it with a cryptic statement. This time it was, “Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod."
Failing to pick up on Jesus’s meaning, the disciples thought Jesus was chiding them for having forgotten to bring bread. Without explaining, Jesus quizzed them about the number of leftover baskets of food collected from both events in which he fed the multitudes. Apparently, the amount of left-over food was supposed to provide them clues for something the Pharisees and Herod were failing to see. Matthew and Luke give some extra details that lend us added perspective. Matthew explicitly names the teaching of the Pharisees as the yeast, and he includes the Sadducees (16:12) among those affected. Luke, in a different story but one in which he includes the same warning, described the yeast as hypocrisy (12.1), the incongruity between what a person outwardly portrays and the inner motives of their hearts.
It’s pretty easy to pick out the Pharisees’ hypocrisy. Jesus exposed it in numerous stories and conversations. However, the Sadducees and Herod didn’t receive as much ink in the gospels. In this story (Matthew and Mark), Jesus explicitly includes them as affected by the same yeast. The Sadducees were Jewish officials who had authority over the Temple. They were notorious for gouging Jewish pilgrims with Temple taxes and fees that made them rich. Instead of mediating God to worshippers, they used the Jewish worship laws for profit.
The Herod of Jesus’s day was given Roman authority to keep the peace in order to insure the economy would continue producing a source for Roman taxes. Herod lived and reigned as a Jew but his loyalty was not to his people. Everyone knew that he ruled as a puppet king for personal gain. Although the Pharisees, Sadducees and Herod were different in numerous ways, each possessed power, wealth and status, and each used them as a means of self-advancement. Therefore, we might paraphrase Jesus’s warning as, “Beware of the yeast of power, wealth, and status to swell your souls with a passion for self like yeast swells dough. It can consume you and, in doing so, destroy you and those in your path.”
Jesus knew that power, wealth and status are captivating to humans because in the world’s culture they promise security, hope, meaning and identity. He also knew that if we live in an effort to secure our lives through one or any combination of the three, we will use people for our purposes. Jesus could also sadly see that even those who don’t possess these much-coveted conditions are often obsessed with their acquisition.
Jesus’s warning to his men was to beware of the alternative to the life he was offering, one in which he freely gives everything we need in abundance (Jn 10:10) and also one in which he provides for our deepest longing (Ps. 42.1). When Jesus quizzed the disciples about the abundance of food left over from the miracle-meals he was inviting them to see him as their life source, one beyond what they could ever ask or imagine (Eph. 3.20).
Finding Jesus to be sustaining and fulfilling begins with recognizing the idolatrous ways we’ve substituted power, wealth or status for Jesus. This idolatry is exposed when we view any measure of power, wealth or status as our source of security, hope, meaning and/or identity. In the same way that power, wealth and status are not life, the absence of them is not death. Death is disconnection from the source of life—Jesus. Even though power, wealth and status are not evil in and of themselves, they do not lead to life.
Finding Jesus to be our source of security, hope, meaning and identity, is not something we can do on our own. It is something we lay hold of by faith because it’s already ours. We do this as we let go of our idolatry, which means repenting of our attempts to quench our thirst from sources that leave us thirsty. In other words, when we see that Jesus is the living water from which drinking will never let us thirst again (Jn 4:13-14), we’ll stop drinking from “broken cisterns” (Jer. 2.13). As we taste of Jesus and see that he is good (Ps 34:8), then power, wealth and status become tools for living instead of our source of life. His life fills our empty places in ways that anchor us in the world with a confidence that what we need most can never be taken from us.