What happens when we stop repeating a familiar explanation and return to the text on which it is based? For me, the account of unleavened bread raises precisely that question.
Exodus connects unleavened bread both with instructions given before the departure and with the urgency of leaving Egypt. (Exodus 12:8, 15–20, 33–39) If we mention only the urgency, we leave out an important part of the account.
I am not questioning the worth of anyone’s faith or the meaning of a festival in a community’s life. I am examining a particular explanation: is it sufficient to say that the people ate unleavened bread simply because there was no time for the dough to rise?
First, look at the sequence
Before narrating the final plague, Exodus describes preparations in which the lamb is selected on the tenth day of the month and kept until the fourteenth. (Exodus 12:3–6) This is not a meal presented as wholly unprepared.
The instructions also specify that the meat is to be eaten with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. (Exodus 12:8) Unleavened bread therefore appears first as a requirement, not merely as the accidental result of a later shortage of time.
Readiness and haste are already part of those instructions: the people are to eat dressed for departure, with sandals on their feet and staffs in their hands. (Exodus 12:11) The narrative does not leave them without any warning that they will need to go.
The same preceding passage sets out the seven-day observance and the removal of leaven from the houses. (Exodus 12:14–20) The account gives unleavened bread a ritual place before describing the departure itself.
Then comes the urgency of leaving
Later, the Egyptians press the people to leave, and the people take their dough before it has been leavened. (Exodus 12:33–34) Verse 39 explains that they bake unleavened cakes because they have been driven out, cannot delay and have not prepared provisions for the journey. (Exodus 12:39)
This is where my question begins. If unleavened bread had already been required, how can a lack of time at departure be the complete explanation?
An instruction and a circumstance do different things in a narrative. One tells people what to do; the other describes the conditions in which they act.
For that reason, I find a haste-only explanation incomplete. It does not account for the prior instruction in the same chapter. (Exodus 12:8–20, 33–39)
Preparation does not rule out urgency. My objection is not to mentioning haste, but to allowing that one detail to stand in for everything the passage says.
This is a question about the explanation, not a verdict against Passover. A careful reading can hold the preparation, the departure and the observance together without turning their relationship into an accusation of deception.
Jesus’ parable: more than one meaning
In Matthew, Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven to leaven that a woman mixes into flour until the whole batch is leavened. (Matthew 13:33) Here, something small and initially hidden becomes the image of a transformation that reaches the whole.
I read this as a correction to a one-sided understanding of the symbol: leaven cannot simply mean something to reject in every context. That is a correction to a limited reading, not a claim that Jesus was correcting the Jewish observance of Passover.
The ritual instruction in Exodus and the parable in Matthew serve different purposes. Removing leaven in one setting does not prevent it from carrying a positive meaning in another. (Exodus 12:15–20; Matthew 13:33)
For me, the parable also offers an image of teaching received inwardly. It does not merely sit beside what we already know; it begins to work through the way we understand, respond and live.
The question is therefore not simply whether there is leaven. It is what we receive, what we nurture and what we allow to shape us.
Elsewhere, Jesus warns his disciples about the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees, and the passage explicitly explains that he is speaking about teaching rather than bread. (Matthew 16:6–12) I take that distinction as a reason to examine the quality of a teaching, not as permission to disparage a religious community.
Paul also uses leaven in a warning, contrasting malice and wickedness with sincerity and truth. (1 Corinthians 5:6–8) In my own application, this invites me to notice what I continue to carry and pass on without examining it.
Not everything old must be discarded. But familiarity alone does not tell me whether I have understood something well.
What we receive continues to work
In my spiritual reading, leaven is also an image of continuity. Something of what we have received lives on in what we think today and in what we offer others.
A thought may be repeated without ever becoming part of our lives. Another may be quietly received, tended and lived until it changes the quality of our presence.
That is the difference that interests me. Not how many teachings I can repeat, but what is actually working through me.
Leaven also calls to mind our past and our belonging. For me, it asks how we remember who we are, where we have come from, and our relationship with the Source, with God and with one another.
Listening to the heart and examining a text carefully are not enemies. In my understanding, the heart is the gateway of connection with God; a recognition received there can also call me to read again, check a detail and reconsider what I had taken for granted.
I do not need to choose between living faith and careful attention. The willingness to look again can itself be an expression of faith.
This is why Jesus’ image of leaven remains so alive for me. It suggests a teaching that does not demand that we perform transformation on the surface, but is received deeply enough to begin changing our life from within.
With love,
Georgina
Soul4you