He spoke another parable to them: The kingdom of Heaven is compared to leaven, which taking, a woman hid in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened. Jesus spoke all these things in parables to the crowds, and He did not speak to them without a parable, so that was fulfilled that spoken through the prophet, saying: “I will open My mouth in parables; I will speak out things hidden from the foundation of the world.” (Matthew 13:33-35)
Those who are in heaven are continually advancing towards the spring of life, with a greater advance towards a more joyful and happy spring the more thousands of years they live; and this to eternity, with increase according to the growth and degree of their love, charity, and faith. Women who have died old and worn out with age, if they have lived in faith in the Lord, in charity to the neighbour, and in happy conjugial love with a husband, advance with the succession of years more and more into the flower of youth and early womanhood, and into a beauty that transcends every conception of any such beauty as is seen on the earth. Goodness and charity is what gives this form and thus manifests its own likeness, causing the joy and beauty of charity to shine forth from every least particular of the face, and causing them to be the very forms of charity. Some who beheld this were struck with amazement. The form of charity that is seen in a living way in heaven, is such that it is charity itself that both forms and is formed; and this in such a manner that the whole angel is a charity, as it were, especially the face; and this is both clearly seen and felt. When this form is beheld it is beauty unspeakable, affecting with charity the very inmost life of the mind. In a word, to grow old in heaven is to grow young. Such forms or such beauties do those who have lived in love to the Lord and in charity towards the neighbour become in the other life. All angels are such forms in endless variety; and of these heaven is constituted. (Heaven and Hell 414)
Today we come to the third of the parables that Jesus introduces with the phrase; the kingdom of heaven is like…and in this parable it is said to be like leaven, leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of meal or flour until the whole was leavened. Up until this point the two parables of the kingdom we have looked at, the wheat and the tares and the mustard seed, have revolved around the idea of seeds or grain. But in the parable we are going to look at today we find something of a shift from the seeds and grains to what is produced from them, that being flour or meal. We also see another significant shift in that it is not a man who is the one engaged in the activity of the parable this time, but a woman.
When we first come to these parables there is a tendency to see them as stories that stand alone but if we look a little deeper we shall see that they are all connected in a wonderful way. For when taken together and seen as a whole, we can gain some precious insights into our own experience of the processes that occur in our inner world when we look to live a spiritual life. The series begins with seeds or grain in the first two parables and with a man as the principle character who is doing the work. Now the masculine form in the symbolic language of Scripture represents the things to do with our understanding faculties and so this is reflective of our first conscious experience of the workings of the kingdom of heaven because we start first with ideas, concepts, principles or truths about the spiritual life. We need these seeds of ideas so that we can actively think about God, life after death, heaven and hell and spiritual life and processes. Without being taught anything about these things we would have no conscious connection with them and so no capacity to develop and deepen in our understanding of them.
However, although it looks like intellectual things come first in the process – this is only an appearance because in and of ourselves we don’t have the slightest inclination or desire for learning spiritual truths. Yet here we are – seeking to know and to understand more, to have our lives improved from a spiritual perspective, being willing to examine ourselves and to undergo spiritual struggle and temptation, and working to keep returning to the Word as the Lord and acknowledging Him as the source of all that is good and true and as the giver of our life. All of these efforts are so against what the natural man or mind is, that we can only conclude that any genuine desire which we have to pursue such a life is something that comes from beyond and above ourselves.
For every genuine desire, motivation or affection that we have for spiritual things is from the Lord and in fact is the Lord. Without Him, the only desire that is left is what is able to gratify the natural man and its love of its self and the material world of the senses from which it thinks and draws its conclusions. So, if we are to be able to seek truths belonging to the kingdom of heaven we have to have a desire or motivation to do so and this is from the Lord. So, it appears as if our contact with ideas is where our spiritual life begins, but we can see that it is in fact the desire and the affection for truth which underlies this search, that is the true impetus. And this is represented by the woman in the story today because the feminine form in the symbolic language of Scripture, pertains to the things that relate to our affections.
So these parables are written from the perspective of what we experience in our work with the Lord’s Word. Just as our conscious sense of natural life began when we drew our first breath so then we become spiritually conscious when we begin to come into contact with spiritual ideas and to think about them in the context of our life. If these seeds, or ideas, or truths are to be sown in fertile ground then we must come to a place where we seek them from a desire for what is good. It’s unavoidable that our search will carry elements of self-interest but if we are willing to take the truths that the Word offers and use them to examine our life in the light of what they teach, then slowly but surely these elements which belong to the false good of the natural man, will fall away. And through this continual practice of the Word, our desires and affections will be incrementally purified and transformed into a genuine kind of spiritual goodness that is grounded in an acknowledgement of the Lord as the source our very life.
And as we saw in the parable of the wheat and the tares, as our understanding of what spiritual life involves deepens and as the concepts grow and develop within us, we come to see what is not compatible or able to support what is genuinely good. We find that amidst the crop of potential goodness are weeds or tares that represent our selfish tendencies, which when acted upon undermine our aim to live a life more in keeping with heavenly principles. This gives rise to anxiety that could so easily derail us, but the teaching is given through the Word that we are not to be anxious. That our work is to let the Lord show us what needs to be seen, for it is the seeing of these things that will eventually free us from our attachments to them. So the process is a gradual revealing and unfolding of things in His time, not ours. We can trust that if we continue to let Him lead us by returning to His Word and practicing what we understand, then He will do what needs to be done in our lives.
So the purpose for the planting of grain is to harvest it so that it can be transformed, yielding up its goodness in a form that can be used to support and nourish the body. The same kind of process occurs at a psychological or spiritual level within our mental world, the world of our thoughts and affections. Learning spiritual truths is akin to the sowing of the seeds of grain in the mind for these ideas and concepts nourish the spiritual body of our thoughts and affections and which, when applied for self examination, can bring enlightenment from the inflow of heaven. This is the incredible beauty that is spoken of in our reading about heaven today, a beauty that shines forth and is expressed through our heavenly or spiritual body when the mind has been prepared for the reception of a genuine desire for the Lord’s goodness.
In the parable of the grain of mustard there is the idea of that which is the least, the smallest of seeds, becoming great. While natural loves dominate spiritual loves, which they do when we first start out on the spiritual path, the kingdom of heaven or the rule of heavenly principles within us is the tiniest of grains in our mind – it is like a mere mustard seed. But when we look to live from these principles, this tiny seed grows into a tree that is able to support higher ideals, aspirations and goals as represented by the birds of the heaven that are able to nest in its branches. As this stage of development reaches maturity, we now have all the principles that we need to enter into a new phase of spiritual life.
This is the phase described by this woman taking leaven and concealing it in three measures of meal. With the meal or flour, we are now introduced to the product of grain once it has undergone the process of grinding. So this meal is the goodness that is able to be drawn from the grain or truths which we have taken into our minds from the Word and have processed in our efforts to live from these ideas and see what they mean for us in terms of our beliefs and in how we live our life. For if the truths and principles which we are learning are to be made available so that they can impact our lives in a positive way, then they have to be taken and processed in the grind of our daily life so that the goodness contained within them can be extracted for further use. So this process of grain into meal represents how truths become refined for us into something that is more useful in serving the spiritual life. So this whole cycle is a complete process which is reinforced by the fact that there are three measures of meal as three spiritually speaking, indicates the completion or fullness of a state.
However, whilst we shouldn’t become discouraged when we appear to fail at trying to live from spiritual principles, it’s inevitable that we will. This is because when we start to make genuine efforts to live from such principles, things begin to ferment within us and heat up. But such times need not be seen as a failing but rather should be taken as a sign that the Lord is truly at work in our lives. The meal spoken of here, to which the leaven is to be added, would be a mixture of water and flour. We know now that the flour is a form of goodness and water, as we have seen previously, corresponds to truth. So the bringing together of these two ingredients represents our efforts to marry what we know with how we live our lives. And the desire to unite the flour and the of spiritual life into something that makes the goodness of heaven available, is represented by the woman who is the leading principle of activity in this whole process. The woman is the active love that rules in the process of spiritual transformation that is described here. She represents the spiritual affection that sits behind our motivation and willingness to make an ongoing commitment to living a spiritual life.
So the operation of this affection from the Lord within our minds draws together what is good and true and sets it alongside those things within us that are evil and false. We saw a similar idea captured in the parable of the wheat and the tares where what was evil and false was left to grow alongside what was good and true. This contrast in what is of heaven and what is of hell is represented by the application of leaven to the meal in this story, as the main use of leaven is to encourage fermentation which leads to the separation of what is useful from that which is damaging to the product it’s found in. In this parable the Greek word used for leaven is zyme which literally means to ferment. So the emphasis here is as much on the process that the woman activates within us as it is on the particular substance she mixes into the meal. In the light of this, the parable teaches us that a genuine affection for truth, the woman when active within us, stimulates a spiritual process of fermentation so that what is evil and false might be seen and separated from those things that are of the Lord and which promote the kingdom of heaven. This process of fermentation involves the struggles of spiritual temptation which is the only way that the self-centred elements that are attached to our thoughts and affections can be removed. Our states of discouragement in the spiritual life should be regarded as part of this purifying process and the better we understand this, the better supported we will feel when we have to pass through these necessary states of spiritual struggle. Resilience in the spiritual life comes from understanding the processes involved and these are presented to us in the Word when it is spiritually understood. This is why it’s so important to remain in the Word, to meditate upon it and to draw upon the doctrines that it offers in our efforts to understand ourselves and the Lord’s activity in our our lives.
This final reading from the work the Arcana Coelestia 7906 comments on this parable…
To go further with what ‘made with yeast’ and ‘not made with yeast’ refer to, it should be recognized that the purification of truth from falsity cannot ever come about in a person without so called fermentation, that is, without the conflict of falsity with truth and of truth with falsity. But after the conflict has taken place and truth has triumphed, the falsity falls away like dregs and the truth emerges purified. It is like wine that becomes clear after fermentation as the dregs sink to the bottom. That fermentation or conflict takes place especially when a person’s state undergoes a change, that is to say, when his actions begin to spring from the good of charity, and not as previously from the truth of faith. For a person’s state is not yet made pure while his actions spring from the truth of faith, but they have been made pure when they spring from the good of charity, since they now spring from his will. Previously they sprang merely from his understanding. Spiritual conflicts or temptations are fermentations in the spiritual sense, for during them falsities wish to link themselves to truths, but the truths reject them, eventually sending them to the bottom so to speak and in that way becoming refined. This is the sense in which to understand what the Lord teaches about ‘yeast’ in Matthew,
The kingdom of heaven is like yeast, which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until the whole was fermented by it. Matthew13:33. (Arcana Coelestia 7906{2-33})