Jesus sometimes loses His patience with His disciples, and in today's Gospel passage (Mk 8: 1-14) that happens. Jesus and the disciples get into a boat and "the disciples have forgotten to bring bread." (Mk 8:1) There is only one loaf for everyone. Jesus' response is to warn the disciples against "the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod." The disciples think that Jesus is saying that because somehow the ball has been dropped and there is only one loaf of bread. I'm guessing there might be a bit of finger-pointing involved over the lack of bread. When Jesus realized that the disciples are worried about why there is only one loaf, Jesus unloads on them. He launches a series of seven mostly-rhetorical questions asking them whether they remember how He fed the 5,000 and the 4,000, and asking if they don't have eyes to see, or ears to hear. He says, essentially, "don't you understand or comprehend" even though I've given you all the parables and explained things to you. "Are your hearts hardened," He asks. How can you be worried, or think I am worried, about not having enough bread, given what you have seen and heard, He seems to be saying. Why in the world would you interpret My comment telling you to watch out for the leaven of the Phatrisees and the leaven of Herod as a suggestion I was worried about a lack of bread? Jesus probably knew that the disciples didn't yet "get it." How could they, after all, given that they had only experienced a part of the story? But He is still pretty frustrated. The important thing is that they hang in there, that they don't give up trying to make sense of what they are experiencing, that they don't give in to "the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod." What does Jesus mean when He talks about those things? Leaven, of course, is like yeast. It is what gives bread dough the chemical energy to rise, so that it can be baked as bread and not as crackers. In a sense it is the power, the driver, the motivator of the bread. We have some sense of what the "leaven of the Pharisees" is because in Luke's Gospel, when Jesus warns the disciples against the "leaven of the Pharisees" the next phrase is: "which is hypocrisy." That makes sense. Jesus often calls the Pharisees hypocrites. Their fundamental drives seems to be that idea of looking good on the outside but being completely different on the inside. It is a little haqrder to figure out "the leaven of Herod," although I do think Jesus has in mind two different things. Herod and the Pharisees are two very different figures, and the idea that their "leaven," their motivation or driver or energy, would be the same seems unlikely. The way that Jesus phrases the admonition seems to suggest two different kinds of leaven as well in that Jesus uses the word "leaven" twice (and doesn't say "the leaven of the Pharisees and Herod," for example). From what we know of Herod let me suggest that his "leaven" was worldliness, that he was motivated by the things of this world-- pleasure, power, being in control, food and drink, sex-- that sort of thing. That certainly is what comes through when we read the story of Herod's being tricked into killing John the Baptist. All those things seem to come into play. Don't worry so much about having only one loaf of bread, Jesus seems to be saying. I can take care of that. But worry about what drives you, what motivates you, what energizes you. Keep focused on Me-- not on how you appear to others or on the things of the world. It is the leaven, not the bread, that matters.