He told the disciples still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough” (Matthew 13:33).
Storyteller, performance artist and poet, Jesus is relentless in seeking to draw us to the truth about the world. He has a unique way of bringing life through word and action. He engages heart and mind and consistently calls upon our ability to imagine. In this parable Jesus is engaging His listeners by speaking of a common daily practice—a woman working with her hands to mix yeast into flour in order to make bread.
This parable alone demonstrates that the truth of Christ must be worked all through culture and all through the world. God’s act of breaking into history in Jesus is brilliantly creative. As yeast is vital for bread, so the kingdom is vital for human life to flourish and be all it is meant to be. Our various cultures have drifted far from what they were intended to be and are in need of the healing and redeeming presence of Christ. One of the ways that the yeast of kingdom presence can be at work in the world is through the arts. Art that is born out of an understanding of the biblical narrative can speak eloquently to a world that has forgotten the story that offers the hope of a new reality. The arts engage our imaginations. They move rather than instruct. They cause us to think rather than tell us what to think. So, like yeast, they are able to generate newness that will serve to nurture us in heart and mind.
We now turn our attention to how the artist can intentionally connect with the kingdom purposes of God, as the “yeast” in cultural and spiritual transformation. When we talk here about the marketplace, we are referring to the everyday world of work and life outside of the church, in our local communities and the culture at large. Central here is the biblical injunction to be culture formers, and so we return again to the cultural mandate.