Essay #13:  Practicing the Presence III:
Following Jesus and Taking Up the Cross 

He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.”

– Matthew 13:33 (NIV)

Again and again, we have found that the soul faces serious challenges in re-establishing and maintaining the disposition most apt for discernment or chochmah to occur. We have explored the challenges of a mistaken cosmology, a mistaken ontology, a confining mind state (understanding), a primordial emotional wound, and the ego untethered from the true source of power. In the last chapter, we followed Jesus, the good shepherd, as he guided our souls between the excesses of the ego we have represented as the two poles of effort and surrender on the Kabbalistic Trigram.  Expressing these as a wolf and hired hand, respectively, gives them a real-world flavor and grounds us at the level of the day-to-day assaults our souls actually encounter.  Not surprisingly, these day-to-day assaults require specific practices to address them in order for us to do as Jesus counsels and follow the Master’s voice.  We continue here with Jesus’s parable of the yeast and the dough.  In this parable we find further practical guidance for steadying and training the soul to enhance its faculty of discernment.  We also encounter an esoteric numerology that leads to the Quadrants of the Cross. As we have said, the latter is Jesus’s most detailed topology of practices comprising the Way of Return. 

The parable of the yeast and the dough can be read for both its superficial and its deeper meanings. The deeper meanings involve the mechanism of the yeast itself, the symbolism of the woman kneading the dough, the numerological significance of the quantities specified, and the relationship of all these things to Jesus’s greater teaching about the Kingdom.  We will explore these momentarily.

The superficial teaching is more straightforward. We are told that the Kingdom of Heaven is akin to a small, virtually invisible, agent working its way gradually to having a large effect on a bigger mass.  The Kingdom is small insofar as it does not brag or boast.  It is invisible insofar as it does not make a show of itself.  It works quietly, but steadily to bring about a larger effect.   This already suggests that the virtues of humility, patience, faith, and forbearance will serve us well in realizing the Kingdom in ourselves and on earth.  And these are virtues that Jesus preaches again and again.

The deeper teaching begins just beneath the surface. For the very way that yeast works begs closer attention and examination.   It is one thing to preach humility, patience, faith, and forbearance, and quite another actually to guide us how to grow or raise these qualities in ourselves.  That, of course, is exactly what yeast does:  it causes bread to rise.  So we can expect concealed in this parable are instructions for us how to get our bread–that is, our virtue–to rise.  This parable is, after all, based on a recipe, so it is reasonable to follow that clue and expect it to contain a recipe itself, a methodology for the attainment of the kingdom, for practice.

Our bread is that which feeds and sustains us. It rises due to something that lives in the hiddenness within us.  That hidden something is ready to work, but it will not work without our kneading it through the entire mass of ourselves.  That mass has the potential to rise, but will not rise without this work on our part.  We must knead and put out effort.  Once our effort is done, however, the bread still needs to be baked.  This is not mentioned in the parable because it is clearly understood; nobody eats dough that has not been baked.  Baking, of course, invokes the fire of the oven, and that fire itself reminds us of the sun.  The context of the parable thus becomes “the heat of the kitchen,” the laboratory in which the life of the family gets worked out, and in a broader sense, the community at large, life “under the sun.”

It is in this context that we knead our dough—that is, put out effort—and also give the loaf over to the heat of the oven—that is, surrender ourselves to the forces and processes of life itself, which will draw us toward completion and fulfillment. This surrender has two sides.  We surrender to Him who dwells hidden within us as deep peace and strength, as wisdom and clarity.  And we surrender to Him also as the hidden source of flame which brings all pressures to bear in the world, which bakes the bread.  We often want to separate these two and to see His peace as separate from the burdens and trials of the world.  Yet are not the trials of the world the very context in which His peace is revealed?  Are not they the humus out of which His glory rises?  Have we not here the yin and yang of the divine dynamism which powers and is our human world?

Surrender understood thus already contains within it the seed of effort, for it is never a blind falling away from the world. It empowers us to re-face the world, to re-encounter it with the dazzling knowledge that He is in it, and in every part of it.  We surrender in order to find Him in the midst of our effort, not to avoid taking action.  Surely, we may need to defer action for a time in order to realign ourselves with our hiddenness so that it may once again become a proper dwelling place for Him.  Jesus himself withdrew to do this.  This may be as simple as resting, or it may be as complicated as a spiritual practice can be:  in the kneading process itself there are both the activities of pounding and also letting the dough rest.

Rested and ready, we re-enter the oven, the heat of the kitchen, the light of day, where the interplay of relationships, commerce, and nature exert their pressures. We at once surrender to life and bring to bear our own efforts to shape the course of events.  When things go well, the yeast expands in us and our physicality—our dough—rises in a way that manifests the kingdom.  For the yeast, being the Spirit of God, is the kingdom itself, and insofar as it raises us up all that we physically manifest reflects the kingdom and is the kingdom brought forth on Earth.  This we may call the beautiful process of “baking bread with the Lord.”

But of course there are many ways that a loaf of bread can go wrong!   And this is where the deeper teaching really takes off, specifically to guide us and protect us from missing the mark.  We will have to look more closely at the symbolism of the parable as we explore these possible missteps.

We first need to ask who the woman is who is kneading the dough, and why Jesus specifies a woman. In Hebrew culture, of course, women made bread, so he could just be reflecting a cultural norm.  However, there was nothing to stop men from making bread, and Jewish men must have done so then, as they do now.  Yet Jesus mentions a woman.  If he means to speak and teach esoterically through this parable, and he is teaching about no less than the nature of the Kingdom, then we must assume this feminine detail is not by accident but has a profound implication and significance.  We must assume that Jesus is placing the feminine creatrix at the head of the Kingdom. This is the kneading creatrix, the God who gives birth, who is actively birthing the universe, including our world.  It is us insofar as we are made in her image and participate in the creation, specifically in the birthing of the Kingdom.

Time and again, Jesus emphatically distanced himself from masculine icons of supremacy and displays of brute strength. He chose instead hidden paths of power, soft ways of being, and quiet strength.  He chose the feminine way.  He did not mean to denigrate the masculine, nor to rank it beneath the feminine; only he meant to bring the two back into balance.  He knew well that in his own day the masculine had become grossly over-inflated, dominating, and destructive.  The kingdom could not be realized without a “course correction” by which the feminine was restored to its rightful place and the two poles restored to balance.  It must be said, too, that the distortion of masculinity into brutishness fully complete by Jesus’s time compromised the ability of creator metaphors to contain the messages Jesus needed to deliver.  Creator metaphors were already too magnetized by the cultural inclination to brutishness.  Hence, Jesus repeatedly resorted to creatrix-type metaphors in his teachings.  That is to say, he used feminine imagery much more than masculine.  Within the creatrix the essential themes of hiddenness, gentleness, patience, longsuffering, and love remain rich and accessible.

The creatrix metaphor of a woman making bread conjures up all these qualities. The esoteric teaching is that we need to inhabit her body in order to foster these divine qualities in ourselves.  We must enter her body and do exactly what she is doing.  What, then, is that?  She is making bread, and how?  She takes 3 measures of flour and adds yeast to that and begins to knead it.  Why three measures, we must ask, and how much is that actually?

In this passage in the Gospel of Matthew, the Greek word for “measure” conveys about a peck and a half, or a little more than a pint. Some interpreters, though, make it out to be a larger quantity, so that 3 measures of flour amounts to about 60 pounds.¹ The numerology here literally explodes in richness once we look deeper.  The 3 measures can be taken to mean the 3 areas of the world known during Jesus’s time.  We can infer, then, that the Kingdom is meant to arise throughout the entire world.  Again, the 3 measures invoke the ways in which Jesus exhorted us to love the Father:  “with all your heart, with all your strength, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  Given that heart and mind were commonly taken to refer to the same thing in the ancient world, one could say that Jesus was being redundant and essentially described 3 ways to love the Lord.  From this viewpoint, the Kingdom is meant to arise throughout all parts of a person and connect her to God through love.  We can easily substitute the more current phrase, “body, mind, and spirit,” where body becomes a surrogate for strength in Jesus’s original.  Then the Kingdom is meant to manifest throughout our body, mind, and spirit as these are linked to God in love.

In making bread, the kneading is done precisely so that the yeast reaches every part of the dough. And this is just where trouble can arise, if it doesn’t.   For then the dough either doesn’t rise, or it collapses during the baking, either of which make it poor bread and unsuitable to eat.  Given the foregoing numerology, we can explore what might happen should the yeast of the Kingdom either not reach all parts of the world or not reach all parts of us.

For the Kingdom not to emerge in all parts of the world would mean that those parts would be left unbalanced as Jesus found them.   The qualities of masculine brutishness such as avarice, violence, lust, murder, hatred, and revenge would go unchecked.  But even more fundamentally, the key elements of effort and surrender would remain out of balance on a social, cultural, and commercial level.  Commercial enterprises, for example, would see success purely as a measure of their own efforts to amass monetary wealth regardless of the social, political, or natural consequences.  Social causes would position themselves behind grabs for power irrespective of the damage done to those with opposing viewpoints.  Culture as a whole would suffer, for only those cultural voices aligned with those in power or with wealth would be tolerated; others would be suppressed.   These are extremes, to be sure, but in the absence of the Kingdom it is extremes that arise.  It is noteworthy that the extremes we most often see are those aligned with an over-emphasis on effort.  Effort is a masculine principle or quality.  Once again, we follow Jesus in recognizing that one of the chief ills of our time—as of his—continues to be the unbalancing inflation of the masculine principle at the expense of the feminine on a global level.

Still more critical are the imbalances that arise in individuals, for it is individuals who make up the bigger social, cultural, and commercial collectives. Within individuals, the Kingdom may fail to arise in either body, mind, or spirit—or in some combination of these.  Once again the key elements in play are effort and surrender, that is, as long as we can assume that the over-arching intention is to bring about the Kingdom of God.  If so, then effort and surrender may go out of balance in body, mind, and spirit.  We must carefully knead the yeast of the Spirit throughout each of these so that none of them falls flat and becomes unsavory.  The actual practices which Jesus teaches to do this kneading go beyond the scope of the parable of the yeast itself, but the foundation for them lies here, buried like the foundation of a great lost city–the City of God.  It can be discovered through a further exploration of the numerology of the parable.

Let us suppose, with some biblical interpreters, that the 3 measures referred to amount to about 60 pounds of flour. The modern unit of weight, the pound, was of course unknown to Jesus, but it was preceded by the standard Roman unit of weight, the libra, from which we actually get the abbreviation for the pound, lb. This unit was equivalent to about three fourths of a pound, and was well established centuries before Jesus, and in his own time.  Therefore, it is possible that the measures of flour he described in the parable would amount to about 60 librae.  In other words, it is possible that Jesus meant to imply a quantity of 60 in a unit of measure that was current in his own day.

If so, we have a new number to ponder in our esoteric numerology, namely, 60. But of course, 60 quickly invokes the number 12– by which it is evenly divisible– because of the 12 disciples.  We then arrive at the number 5, which is the divisor.  What, then, does 5 have to do with anything?

Here we at last begin to discern within this parable the boundaries of that sacred domain we name the Quadrants of the Cross. This opens us to the heart of the Christology itself.  For when Jesus said, “Pick up your cross and follow me!”, he meant that we should aim to put ourselves just where he was going:  at the center of the cross.  Taken literally this can get us into all kinds of difficulties.  However, taken esoterically as the focal point for a balanced life, it makes eminent sense.

What the foregoing esoteric numerology of the parable of the yeast contributes are the dimensions of a practical matrix for spiritual centering. Indeed, it elicits an entirely new comprehension of the symbol of the cross itself as a living guide to discipleship.  For the number 5 precisely describes both the focal center of the cross and the 4 quadrants above and below, left and right.  The quadrants themselves are vertically divided by the horizontal beam of the cross and horizontally divided by the vertical beam.  The region above the horizontal beam being smaller than that below may be understood to represent the Heavenly realm, and that below, the Earthly realm.  It is not, of course, that Heaven is absolutely smaller with respect to Earth, but rather that our understanding of and participation in heavenly things is smaller.  We remember that Jesus said, “How can I teach you about heavenly things when you don’t even fully understand earthly things?”²

The quadrants to the left of the vertical beam correspond with effort, and those to the right of the vertical beam with surrender.  This matrix mirrors the Tree of Life, or Etz Chayim, in Kabbalah, something made famous in books written centuries after Jesus but whose sources include Genesis and mystical currents certainly known already in his time.³  Thus there are 4 quadrants and one center defined by the cross.  And from the parable of the yeast we may infer that these 5 divisions overlap both the 3 areas of the known world and the 3 parts that make up a person. Seen in this way, the cross becomes a diagrammatic representation of what it means to follow Jesus and what it means to “miss the mark” or to sin.  To follow Jesus means to engage in practices which return us to the “Jesus point” at the center of the cross and also practices which keep us there.  To sin means to drift away from the Jesus point into one of the four quadrants where we miss the mark.  The 12 apostles symbolize discipleship and may be said to appear in each of the 5 divisions when these practices are being successfully carried out.  Thus the number 60 reappears symbolizing the kneading of the yeast through the whole mass of dough.  In other words, the Quadrants of the Cross (taken collectively to include the 4 quadrants proper and the Jesus point) is the topology governing the specific practices which define the emergence of the kingdom throughout a person and throughout the world.  It is nothing short of the the most specific map Jesus provided for the Way of Return to the City of God and to the Father himself.

Within individuals, imbalances between effort and surrender can show up essentially in 4 ways. Once we become de-centered from the cross, we err in one or more of the 4 quadrants defined by it.  Each specific error is characterized by whether we are over-emphasizing effort or surrender.  It is also characterized by whether it pertains more to the heavenly realm or to the earthly.  These 4 permutations get mixed up with each of the 3 parts of ourselves—namely, body, mind, and spirit—to create vast subdivisions of emotional, psychological, spiritual, and physical disorders and imbalances.  We will see that Jesus designed practices specifically to address the nature of the ills showing up in each of the 4 quadrants, as well as a practice for the center.  In the case of the practice at the center, it is designed to keep one there.  The others are all designed to return one there.

The nature of sin or erring in each of these 4 quadrants may best be understood for now by example. Let us consider examples to illustrate each of the 4.  (1) Sin in the lower right quadrant is characterized by excesses both in surrender and in earthly nature.  Giving over to the cravings and lusts of the body illustrates sin in this quadrant.  All manner of addictions fall here including those for pornography, sex, alcohol, and drugs.  (2) Sin in the lower left quadrant is defined also by an excess in earthly nature, but here also by an excess of effort.  All kinds of physically oriented efforts show up here such as those involved in the amassing of wealth, property, collections and rarities, hobbies, vacation homes, and the like.  Human and animal trafficking and enslavement fall here, too, as do genocide and any primarily physical or brute expression of force or effort.  (3)  In the upper right quadrant, sin is marked by overmuch surrender to some spiritual or quasi-spiritual values, for instance, a set of religious norms or values espoused by a particular church or sect.  These values may be explicit or implied, and they may or may not be embodied in particular persons.  When they are, sin in this quadrant often takes the form of “guru-worship” or the idolization of certain religious figures.  Error here may be marked by extremism showing up as a kind of powerlessness to think for oneself or to make one’s own choices.  It may also appear as a kind of hopelessness or even self-deprecation lured by the prospect of being saved or redeemed–completely regardless of one’s personal efforts or lack thereof.  (4) In the upper left quadrant we encounter a different kind of sin.  Also quasi-spiritual, sin here entails harboring a belief in the extraordinary efficacy of one’s own efforts and perhaps the efforts of the group one identifies with.  We may call this the “sin of pride.”  Here one’s own efforts become detached from surrender.   Perhaps one becomes blinded by his successful efforts to help or inspire others and forgets that within every risen loaf lies hidden the yeast that caused it to rise.  Essentially, who gets forgotten is the Source of All, to whom we must always remain attached by the strong cord of surrender.  Sinners in this quadrant become the false prophets and gurus who dominate others.  They can also become political leaders who reign from high places and exert a quasi-spiritual dominance over their people.  These are the first to take literally that God meant kings to be his representatives on Earth.

These are but a few examples of hundreds that could be produced of sin in each of the 4 quadrants of the cross. The greatest example of what it means to live life at the center of the cross is Jesus himself.  However, for each of the 5 areas Jesus also left us spiritual practices, embedded at the deeper levels of his teachings, in fulfillment of his promise to us that “the Kingdom of God is at hand.”  The way to follow him, and to return to him from any of the 4 quadrants, is at hand; so that no matter where we find ourselves in the panopoly of sin we can return home, we can be saved.

Salvation, by this Christology, is not a matter merely of giving up one’s former ways. Nor is it a matter simply of adopting certain beliefs, nor of engaging in a prescription of activities or evangelism.  More than anything else, salvation means a return to living a balanced life literally with Christ at the center,–that is, together with Christ and at the center. To presume that our salvation is through Christ alone while we place or find ourselves in some much lower station is actually to dis-align ourselves from Christ.  Otherwise, why would Jesus have prayed that we dwell in the Father and be one in him and the Father?  To that end, he offers us 5 types of spiritual practices designed to live among us like the apostles and bring us and keep us home.  Salvation is already ours insofar as He has never abandoned us.  He has always dwelled in us as the yeast that was ready to rise.  But He gives it to us to knead the dough, to step into the heat of the kitchen and out into the light of day where His glory can be revealed in us, and through us, and around us.

As we advance to discuss each type of practice, we must keep in mind that even these types are not exhaustive of Christ’s teaching. It would be folly to expect that any human mind could receive or extract all the practices or methodologies implicit in Christ’s teachings, for what issued from him came from a deep and inexhaustible well.  Here we but attempt to follow his lead and invite the Spirit to come fill the 5 flasks he has shown us with examples of each type of practice.  Thus may we pour glasses of rich substance from each of the flasks.

The practices we will consider are balancing and edifying practices, with the exception of the practice at the center, which is a centering and focusing practice.  To edify means to build or establish.  In this case, what is meant is to build on a solid foundation, to build on rock, on God. Even those among us who stand on rock for a time will drift onto sand and need to find ways to reestablish themselves on rock.  Jesus declared Peter the “rock of my Church,” but even Peter proved unstable.  Of course, most of us are struggling to an even greater degree with the ways we have fallen from the rock, or perhaps drifted from it.  Like Peter, we will all find ourselves in need of returning to Jesus, and so the balancing and edifying practices are designed as correctives to bring us back to him.  These are practices specifically tailored to the kinds of troubles we find ourselves in.  They are in fact antidotes for the particular toxins at work in us.  The cross itself suggests this.  Its 4 quadrants encompass the center in such a way as to balance each another.  For example, it would appear that a sin of surrender to the physical nature (lower right) could be set right by the application of extra effort applied to heavenly or spiritual concerns (upper left), and this is true, as will be revealed in our fuller consideration of these practices.

However, before we take up the balancing practices, we will begin our consideration of the Quadrants of the Cross with the core centering practice Jesus gave us in the Lord’s Prayer.

 

Notes:

1. For example in the biblical commentary known as Bengal’s Gnomon, the unit of measure in question is described as: “As much as was generally carried by a man, or taken for baking, at once.”  We can easily see where this could amount to 20 pounds, or 60 pounds in total.  Ancient commentators such as Josephus and Jerome make the unit equivalent to one and a half Roman bushels.
2. See John 3:12.
3. The association of left with yang or strength and right with yin or yielding was also well-established in centuries-old Oriental philosophy. The diagrammatic Etz Chayim is usually attributed to the 16th century rabbi and mystic, Isaac Luria, as transmitted by his closest disciple, Rabbi Hayyim Vital.  However, it is more likely that Vital was the first to set to paper what had long existed in many forms as an oral mystical teaching or tradition.