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May 19, 2026 06:00am

Walking Through Luke: The Leaven of the Pharisees

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What are you afraid of?

There are a few things I’m scared of. The main three are probably dogs, heights, and water. As I’ve gotten older, I have mostly trained myself out of my fear of dogs, but it’s an instinctual, ingrained feeling that I still wrestle with. When I was very little—probably no more than four years old—our dog, Shadow, got excited and jumped on me. He knocked me over and was jumping around on top of me. That was enough to instill a fear of dogs in my young mind that I never completely overcame.

When it comes to heights, I don’t know if I have a specific incident that caused me to become afraid, but there is one thing that might have done it. My grandparents lived at the top of a mountain. Their driveway looped down and around to the back of the house, where it overlooked the valley below the mountain. There was a sharp drop-off maybe sixty or seventy feet from their back door. When we were little, my brother and I were playing outside, and he slipped on some loose rocks and nearly fell. He had to cling to the edge of the drop-off while I ran to get my dad and grandpa to help pull him back up. Maybe that’s what started my fear of heights.

And regarding my fear of water, my aunt was painting someone’s house, and my family was there helping her. The owners had a pool in their backyard. My dad can’t swim, but my aunt’s boyfriend didn’t know that. He came up behind my dad and shoved him in. My dad started splashing frantically and calling for help. My aunt’s boyfriend jumped in and helped my dad get out of the water, but that stuck with me. A few years later, when my mom put us in swimming lessons, I really didn’t want to do it, and at one of the first lessons, something very similar happened to me—I was out in the middle of the pool, and the instructor had told me to swim from one side of the pool to the other, but I was flailing around and panicking. I have never learned to swim, and I still don’t like deep water.

Some fears are deeper than others. Some can be overcome. Others stick with us our whole lives. Some are natural; others border on paranoia. But regardless of what you are afraid of, we all have fears.

Luke 12:1–12 brings us into the aftermath of Jesus’ condemnation of the Pharisees and lawyers. He turned aside from the overwhelming crowd to speak privately to His disciples. He warned them about the “leaven” of the Pharisees. Leaven, an ingredient similar to yeast, is used to make dough rise. It permeates the whole loaf. During the Passover feast, the Jewish people would make sure they didn’t have any leaven around, so they made fully unleavened bread for the celebration. But in this case, Jesus wasn’t talking about bread and yeast. He was talking about the Pharisees’ hearts—and the leaven was their hypocrisy. Matthew 16:12 equates the leaven with their teachings, proving that the teachings and hypocrisy of the Pharisees went hand in hand.

Jesus said that the Pharisees tried to hide their true nature in the dark. They kept their sinful thoughts buried deep and spoke unrighteous things in private. They thought that as long as they acted righteous in public, they could get away with sinfulness when they were alone. But Jesus warned that anything done in secret would inevitably be brought to light. For that reason, they had less to fear from those who could hurt them and more to fear from the One who had the power to control their eternal destiny. God was not fooled by their acts of self-righteousness. He saw deep into their hearts and knew the sinfulness there.

Because of this knowledge, Jesus instructed the disciples that they had nothing to fear from the Pharisees. They could only kill the body. In contrast, if He desired, God had the authority to cast the dead into hell. There are several words in the Bible that we translate as “hell” in English. The one used in this passage is Gehenna. It is translated in other passages as “the outer darkness.” It represents a place of unrighteousness away from the presence of God.

In the Old Testament, the Valley of Hinnom (Ge-Hinnom) was on the border of Judah and Benjamin. Jeremiah reveals that several of Judah’s wicked kings committed child sacrifice in this valley, and the prophet later cursed that land. By using the name Gehenna, which had been adopted in Jewish rabbinic literature to represent divine judgment, Jesus was evoking harsh imagery of the Pharisees’ destiny. God could cast them out of His presence and into the outer darkness—the place of wickedness—for their secret sins.

In contrast to the Pharisees’ flippant attitude, God pays attention to His people. To humans, sparrows were virtually worthless. Jesus said someone could buy five for two pennies. One wouldn’t give much consideration to the well-being of a sparrow. But God never forgets even one of them. In the same way, He knows everything about us. He saw the sins that the Pharisees committed in private, and He saw the effects those sins had on the poor and innocent people the Pharisees didn’t care about. But those same people, forgotten by the rich and powerful religious crowd, mattered more to God than many sparrows.

Among the greatest sins of the Pharisees was their continued rejection of Jesus. They were plotting against Him in private (Luke 11:53–54), but God was aware that they had already chosen to reject Him. This was the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit: a continued, willful rejection of Jesus, to the point of calling Him a servant of Satan (Luke 11:15). This is not a sin anyone can commit accidentally; it is an intentional rejection and mockery of Jesus. In contrast to the denial the Pharisees would face before God, the disciples had nothing to fear. They would be dragged before courts and questioned about their reasons for following Jesus, but the Holy Spirit would give them the right words to say. We see this happen multiple times in Acts, which was also written by Luke.

So, the Pharisees could hurt the disciples. They could imprison them, beat them, and even kill them. But that was the extent of the harm they could do. At the end of the day, the disciples still had fellowship with God. But the greater danger was not something the disciples had to fear: being shut out of the plan and fellowship God had in store for His people. The Pharisees were going to miss that because they had already rejected Jesus and, in doing so, blasphemed the Holy Spirit.

What about you? Are you afraid of what might happen to you because you take a stand for your faith? Remember, Jesus said we don’t have to be afraid of what people can do to us. Those who reject us for our faith are actually rejecting Him, and that rejection comes with consequences. We don’t want to be excluded from that eternal fellowship with God, so it is up to us to remain faithful to Him. We should live for Him both in public and in secret. What we think and intend should align with how we portray ourselves. God sees our hearts. He knows what our intentions are. We need to make sure they align with Him.