Variety: Matthew 13:33

33 He told them still another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about thirty kilograms of flour until it worked all through the dough.’

Richard Rohr describes why role models and personal examples often inspire change more effectively than right ideas and beliefs:  

Correct ideas and church mandates cannot cause the kind of change that the soul needs. The soul needs living models to grow, exemplars with the expansive energies of love. People who are eager to love change us at the deeper levels. They alone seem able to open the field of both mind and heart at the same time. When we’re in this different state—and that is what it is—we find ourselves open to directions or possibilities we would never allow or imagine before.  

When I taught in South Africa, again and again I heard how Nelson Mandela initiated a cultural leap forward for many African men, especially when they saw pictures of him hoeing in the fields, which they still thought of as women’s work. He was a good example of both an exemplary and a final cause. He changed the tangent and the possibility for many people.  

I believe the gospel itself  is primarily communicated by richly symbolic human lives that operate as prime attractors and exemplars: through actions visibly done in love; by a nonviolent, humble, simple, liberated lifestyle; by a happy identification with poor and excluded people; by obvious happiness itself; and by concrete and visible people who “give others reasons for spiritual joy” When such people then speak or act, their words burn, and their actions convict!  

Surely this is what Jesus meant when he told us to be “a light on a lampstand” or to be “leaven” and “salt” (Matthew 5:13–15, 13:33). He knew that holiness is passed on through contagion.