Matthew 4:1-11 Commentary

Comments, Questions, and Observations

What sort of place is the biblical motif of “wilderness” to you? I added biblical intentionally there because I live in a beautiful part of the world where wilderness is part of enjoying recreation and everyday life. If you’ve ever visited Egypt, Jordan, Israel or Palestine, and retraced the steps of God’s people on their forty-year wilderness wandering, then you know it’s not the wilderness of British Columbia…

More often, I think, we correlate the wilderness to a dry and weary place, an inner, personal space of hardship. Truly, it is comforting to imagine that Jesus understands such a place, and truly, we are called to pull upon the same hope and trust that comes to define faith in the wilderness space, but if our minds associate it too much to an individual reality, we lose something important. The wilderness was a place that the Israelites had to survive together. They knew firsthand how their actions impacted one another; they knew firsthand how they could either spur one another on to faith or to doubt. As a nomadic group, they entered into a group project of life together in ways we cannot quickly imagine as they traversed mountainous desert on the way to a land flowing with milk and honey.

To be sure, the geography and climate of the wilderness definitely help define the motif of the biblical narrative, but it was not the sole aspect or meaning. Any of us who have done a team building retreat at a remote location has a taste of what I’m talking about.

But, “wilderness” denoted a place of strengthening or testing, letting one’s faith “prove” like dough over time. The people of God would have to go through the wilderness to get to the Promised Land no matter what, but that they stayed in it for forty years as one generation came of age in a new reality of faith and life with God is telling. The journey started with falling to temptation because of a lack of trust and hope, the journey ends with a call to continue in trust and hope even though circumstances have changed. They are building faith, in God, together.

It is this same trust and hope that is tested in Jesus’s own wilderness narrative. Once again, the Messiah joins the story of God’s people, spending forty days and nights as an echo of their forty years. Anna Case-Winters highlights how Jesus’s answer further points to the link as he draws his response to the tempter’s provocations with, “It is written…” and teachings from a wilderness text, Deuteronomy 6-8.

Jesus is tempted by food, by who to worship, and by the power of the nations—all three of which the Israelites faced in their own wilderness wanderings. Sometimes they were able to withstand the temptation to grumble and to have faith, and sometimes they did not. Jesus, on the other hand, paves a perfect path of righteousness, calling upon the lessons of the Israelite’s wilderness even though what Satan offers him is firmly within Jesus’s rights and reach.

The wilderness temptations are perhaps more for us than they were for Jesus. They “prove” to us what sort of God he is. Biblical exegetes point out that the tempter starts each of his offers with the Greek word, ei. It is most often translated as “if” but can also be causal, “since…” Given the context of Jesus’s time in the wilderness—that he is led there by the Spirit immediately on the heels of his baptism, “Since you are the Son of God,” has a different temptation to it than “If you are the Son of God…” One tries to trick Jesus to doubt, the other to take advantage. Jesus refuses to fall for either, proving his humility through denying himself for the sake of others.

And here’s where the Christian tradition’s understanding of the wilderness really comes to roost for me. The first desert fathers and mothers saw this text as a call to battle the powers of evil and Satan’s temptations on behalf of the world around them. St. Anthony, the patriarch of the monastic tradition, is said to have literally battled demons and Satan from his cave. They did so, believing that they followed Jesus’s example. What if we understood ourselves as being led into the wilderness to battle evil as the tempter works to harm and lead others astray? What if we understood the group nature of this setting and let our faith and trust prove themselves in the way we fought for what is good and pure, according to the Word of God? What if we stood up to evil with the truth of the gospel? What if the wilderness is already here in our midst, on our streets?

Textual Point

In this story, Satan is referred to in three different ways. There’s the fact that Jesus calls him Satan as though it’s his name (Satan means “enemy of God” or was a term for an adversary). Then, throughout the narrative, the noun devil (diablos) is used, which relates to being a slanderer. Perhaps most significant in connection with the biblical narrative, however, is the first description using the present active participle of the verb peirazō, translated as “tempter.” It’s the same root word that we find in Hebrews 2.18 and 4.15—both of which describe how Jesus understands what it’s like to be us because he was “tempted in every way.” We are tempted by the same tempter, so we can learn how to defeat his tricks from the one who endured with us but never wavered from the path of righteousness.

[Note: For the Year A Season of Lent and leading up to Easter, CEP has, in addition to these weekly sermon commentaries, a special Lent and Easter Resource Page with links to whole sermons, commentary on Lenten texts, and more.]

Illustration Ideas

Along with part-time pastoring, I teach part-time at a Christian high school. The other day a colleague of mine was retelling a story from his old school participating in the 30 Hour Famine with World Vision. This teacher always had Oreos or Fudgeeos in his lunch to the point that his class, right after lunch, would try to guess which it was that day. On famine day, the teacher became the tempter, putting his lunch Oreos on top of the clock at the front of the room and offering them to any student who wanted them. Almost immediately, one student jumped up from his chair, overturned his desk table, and like Godzilla, crashed up to the front of the room cursing and muttering about how stupid the famine activity was, devouring the cookies in front of everyone. Some of us struggle more than others, and some of us are not good at supporting others through those sacrificial trials and testing grounds.

If you’d like some stories to think about ways that contemporary Christians are standing up to evil in the US, I recommend following journalist Jack Jenkins at Religion News Service.