Jesus enjoined them, "Watch out,
guard against the leaven of the Pharisees
and the leaven of Herod."
One must be on guard when adding ingredients, because a "little leaven leavens the whole lump" (see Galatians 5:8). This means there is the potential for a little bit added in the beginning to corrupt an entire project. Of this sort of leaven Paul wrote, "[c]leanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth" (see First Corinthians 5:7-8). But the Kingdom could also act as leaven in the sense of having disproportionately large impact compared to the initial apparently meager investment, hence the parable of Jesus that "The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened" (see Matthew 13:33).
Leaven seems to be trivial and insignificant at first but later on down the road the impact can be surprising. That means we must guard against even the beginnings of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees of the corrupt self-indulgence of Herod. An innocuously small bit of these ingredients added into the mix early on can eventually result in an unsavory loaf.
They concluded among themselves that
it was because they had no bread.
When Jesus cuts to our motives in a way that is potentially uncomfortable may try to distract ourselves with external and apparently more concrete realities. If we had only remembered that bread! But it was not the omission of preparations at a human level that Jesus was criticizing. Clearly he himself was sufficient preparation against a lack of physical bread, having fed the five thousand and the four thousand. But his physical presence was no guarantee that the disciples wouldn't reproduce the faults of the Pharisees and the Herodians. Only relying on him, and on the leaven of the Kingdom, would ensure there was no temptation to attempt to make the project grow in other ways. The only ingredients worth adding to the mixture that would grow and impact the world, as bread to be broken and shared, were the gifts that come from God.
Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers and sisters:
all good giving and every perfect gift is from above,
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