ζύμῃ (dzoo-may): Leaven in the Epistles: From the leaven of spiritual conceit, malice and wickedness to the unleavened Passover bread of sincerity and truth—a life in Christ walking by the Spirit

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The Epistles: Summary Synthesis

The “leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” is now operating, not outside the Church in false, religious sects, but within the Church of Jesus Christ. And this leaven leads its members into the spiritual deceit of prelest that operates through the corruption of the flesh.

In “diagnosing” then “treating” this spreading, spiritual disease in I Corinthians 5, Paul calls the church to “purge out the old leaven” and become truly“unleavened.” The reason he then gives is that “Christ, our Passover” is “sacrificed for us” and we are, therefore, to “keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” The true leaven is Christ operating in us through the Holy Spirit.

In Galatians, Paul has to confront the entire hyperstructure of a church that has received, not the Gospel of Christ, but the leaven of a false Gospel with its false righteousness that will lead us back naturally into the pathway of the “works of the flesh” that continually obstruct the Spirit of God working to bring Christ into the depths of the human heart.

Detailed Analysis

From the opening uses of zýmē in the Gospels that contrast the operations of the Kingdom of God working through the Holy Spirit with the hypocrisy and fallen human power of This Age, we continue into the Epistles, where the final five uses appear in two chapters of two Pauline letters: I Cor 5 and Galatians 5.

I Cor 5

The context of I Corinthians 5 is sexual immorality (porneía) within the church that Paul says is so abhorrent that it is “not even named among the Gentiles” (5:1). He then goes on to write that such practices, however, rather than causing the Corinthians to “mourn,” have worked in them to actually “puff” them up  (pephysiōmenoi) in spiritual pride—a state referred to by the Fathers as prelest, which we could say, is the leaven of the hypocritical, religious life operating in individuals to generate a deceived, inner state of demonic pride that actively and continually obstructs any possibility of true repentance (metanoia).

In the words of Pavel Florensky, earlier referenced

This disastrous enslavement is called by the ascetic tradition prelest: it means spiritual pride or conceit, and it is the direst spiritual state a person can be in.

A very bold statement: the “direst spiritual state a person can be in.”

Yet why would he make so bold a statement?

If we follow his line of reasoning further, we become aware of why this warning is applied (and it especially makes sense in light of the Corinthian church):

When we sin and give into the passions with our conscience still being in tact, we hit against the sacred order of God’s creation. And the effect can be to lead us to repentance:

In committing any other sin, a person acts in such a way that he falls into a relation with the external world, with its objective properties and laws, within which he is working against the sacred order of God’s creation, hitting against and striving to break it. Thus, an ordinary sinner can discover in this relation the fulcrum to change his consciousness and bring repentance (to repent in Greek is metanoiein—to change the totality of consciousness at the deepest level of being).

“Prelest, however, is entirely different.” It defies the structures of the created order. Here, giving into the passions no longer produces guilt; for a person has somehow moved beyond such limited constructs:

Here, the deluded self does not seek superficial satisfaction of this or that passion; but—far more dangerously—it imagines itself to be moving along the perpendicular to the sensory world, withdrawn from it.

The passions, however, are still operative yet not in a way that produces guilt with the possibility of metanoia. As such, the passions’ grip tightens:

Thus completely unsatisfied, the self-absorbed soul in prelest is held by the spirits who inhabit the boundary and who are, then, nourished by the soul’s own troubled, unsatisfied passions…

It is, we might say a cycle which intensifies

Prelest, of course, brings images that stir passions in us. But our real danger lies not in the passions but in our appraisal of them.

For we may, if caught in prelest, take the passions as directly opposite to what they really are. Usually, we would see our sinful passions as a dangerous weakness, thereby finding the humility that heals us of them.

In prelest-stirred passions, however, we see them as attained spirituality, as sacred energy, salvation, and holiness (cf. Is 65:1-6)..

Thus, where ordinarily we would seek to break the grip of our sinful passions—even if our attempts were weak and futile—in prelest, driven by spiritual conceit, spiritual sensuality, and (above all) spiritual pride, we seek to tighten the knots that bind us. An ordinary sinner knows he is falling away from God; a soul in prelest thinks it is drawing ever closer to Him....

And so, the Corinthians, involved in the most abhorrent sexual practices, were not ashamed by their immorality. They did not “rather mourn” (pentheó) but became puffed up into prelest-stirred, spiritual conceit and pride. And the effect was a spiritual blinding such that they could not see clearly enough to realize “that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among [them, 5:2].

What, then, does the Apostle recommend to those blinded by prelest and spiritual conceit?

He does not prevaricate; he judges.

For I indeed, as absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged (as though I were present) him who has so done this deed (5:3).

“As if on the point of expelling some contagion before it spreads itself into the rest of the body, he hastens to restrain it.”1

And he does so, not in the zymē of his own wisdom and power; “not possessed with any human prejudice.”

Rather, “in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, he commands them, “when [they] are gathered together, along with [his] spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:4) to—and this is quite an astonishing, even shocking action, that does not seem typical of our culture’s pastoral counseling—

Deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh

And why?

That his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus (5:5).

Once again, he commands what seems so counter to our therapeutic (and even, hedonistic), Christian culture:

Deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh (cf. I Tim 1:20).

“As was done in the case of the blessed Job, but not upon the same ground. For in that case it was for brighter crowns, but here for loosing of sins…And so this too which God had determined ensued, that the man's flesh was chastised.”1, 2

This deliverance, which stands an an other-worldly, redemptive action then leads into three uses of zymē in short succession. And it reveals not only how the “leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” and “leaven of Herod” can be identified, but, moreover, how it can be dealt with.

First, the diagnosis:

Your glorying is not good.

Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? (5:6)

The spiritual-prelest that manifests itself in a “spiritual” congregation when seeming believers “delight in their faults”1 displays to us how the “leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” can work its way into the Church.

And so, Paul, as an apostle and shepherd, exposes the hypocrisy in a way that reveals how it can then be treated:

Therefore purge out the old leaven (i.e. that which is puffing you up in prideful, spiritual conceit)

That you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened (5:7).

That is to say, they are to purge out the leaven of This Fallen Age, hypocritically parading as religion, which works in a congregation to counteract the operations of the Spirit.

So the step forward is that they must be purged to the degree that they become truly unleavened.

They must become like the Israelites of old—centuries-long slaves in a kingdom of darkness with absolutely nothing to their name except a God Who delivers in His way at His time.

And his deliverance comes not through the leaven of fallen human power but though the “Feast of Unleavened Bread” wherein the “Passover Lamb” is sacrificed (Ex 12:17-23).

For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us (5:7).

“The lamb, then, was sacrificed yearly; then followed a feast, the celebration of which lasted for seven successive days. Christ, says Paul, is our Passover—He was sacrificed once, and on this condition, that the efficacy of that one oblation should be everlasting. What remains now is, that we eat, not once a-year, but continually”1

Therefore let us keep the feast

And how?

Not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness (cf. Lk 11:39),

but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth (5:8).

“As the outward passover was to them a figure of the true passover, so its appendages were figures of the reality which we at this day possess. If, therefore, we would wish to feed on Christ’s flesh and blood, let us bring to this feast sincerity and truth. Let these be our loaves of unleavened bread.

Away with all malice and wickedness, for it is unlawful to mix up leaven with the passover. In fine, he declares that we shall be members of Christ only when we shall have renounced malice and deceit.”2

Galatians 5

We come now to the final occurrence of zýmē. And as it is an exact repetition of I Cor 5:6–“a little leaven leavens the whole lump”—we will examine it by focusing primarily on the larger context and movements of the book and chapter as a whole.

Paul is writing to a church which has been infiltrated by the “leaven” of the “doctrine of the Pharisees and Sadducees,” which has turned them from the “grace of Christ to a different gospel“ (Gal 1:6). To this false doctrine of a different Gospel, rooted in a seeming righteous appropriation of the Law, Paul says, in short,

“For I through the law died to the law that I might live to God.

And further,

I have been crucified with Christ;

It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me;

And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith of the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me” (2:19-20).

Paul then asks a series of questions that move us to the heart of how this leaven of religious hypocrisy works in the Church to entangle and deceive:

“O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed among you as crucified?

Question #1.

Then questions #2 and #3:

This only I want to learn from you:

Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?—

Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh? (3:1-3).

Paul declares to them, “as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse” (3:10). If, however, they reject the Gospel of Christ Jesus, Who has “redeemed us from the curse of the Law” (Gal 3:13) for a false gospel—be it preached by an “angel from heaven” (Gal 1:8)—they will be opened to the contagion of a false righteousness.

It will lead them—and us—down a path, wherein the Law continues to enslave, rather than being a “tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith” (3:24).

It will keep us from the experience of being “baptized into Christ”; from “putting on Christ” (3:26).

It will keep us from receiving the sending down of the “Spirit of His Son into [our] hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!” revealing to us that we are “longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ” (4:6).

And now Galatians 5.

From this false covenant of slavery (Gal 4:21-31), we are brought into the “liberty by which Christ has made us free” (5:1a). We are called, therefore, to “not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage” (5:1b).

We are called “through the Spirit” into the “hope of righteousness by faith” (5:5); into a “faith that works through love” (5:6).

Anything less is a “little leaven that leavens the whole lump” (5:8), which will draw us away from the redeeming power of the “offense (literally, the scandal) of the cross” (5:11).

Anything less will lead us into the prelest of a false Christian “liberty” that is nothing more than an “opportunity for the flesh” (5:13).

Anything less will ensure that we do not “walk in the Spirit,” but rather “fulfill the lust of the flesh” (5:16).

Anything less will lead us, in summary, into the “works of the flesh” (5:19-21).

And this begins, fascinatingly enough, with what exactly what Paul was dealing with in I Cor 5–“adultery, porneia, uncleanness…” (5:19).

And finally, this will keep Christ from working in us to bring forth the “fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control—against which there is no law” (5:22-23).

It will ensure that we are not “Christ’s” who “have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

This leaven will, to bring this all to a close, ensure that we can never truly “live in the Spirit” nor “walk in the Spirit,” but will ever remain, “conceited” by the prelest of a false Gospel.