Jesus Stands with Israel and for Us - Reflections on Matthew 4:1-11, First Sunday in Advent, Year A
by John C. Holbert on Saturday, January 3, 2026
It is hardly unusual to include Mt.4 as the text for the first Sunday in Lent. If Lent is about self-examination, about personal and communal responses to the call of God, then Mt.4 is precisely the text we need. Jesus, says Matthew, is our model in testing and gives us ways that we can pass every test that life can throw at us. Jesus is tested in the wilderness, as Israel was likewise tested, but while Israel in the main failed its divine testing, Jesus passes his. However, just because that scenario is correct—failure vs. success—that should not lead us to proclaim Jesus somehow the “new Israel.” Now that Jesus has defeated the tempter, it is sometimes said, we need no longer pay serious attention to the failed Israelites; Jesus is victor while Israel has utterly failed. This supersessionist claim is not the upshot of this famous story. To the contrary, Jesus stands with Israel by accepting the challenges posed by Moses in Deuteronomy 6-8, the vital text which Matthew rings his changes on as he constructs his tale about Jesus’ testing in the wilderness by the devil. While it is true that Israel both fails its wilderness test, and also tests YHWH in the bargain, and that Jesus both passes his test and refuses to test God, still Jesus does not thereby surpass Israel, but rather takes his identity as God’s Son from Israel. In addition, Psalms 90 and 91 will offer Matthew several phrases that will cement that Jesus-Israel connection.
“Then Jesus was led up into the wilderness by the Spirit to be tested by the devil” (Mt.4:1). This testing tale follows directly from the story of Jesus’s baptism, where it is revealed directly from God that Jesus is in fact “God’s Son,” the “beloved in whom God is greatly pleased” (Mt.3:17). In the same way that God’s chosen nation, Israel, following their release from Egypt by the power of God, finds itself in the wilderness to be tested, so Jesus, following his divine approbation at his baptism, is also tested in the wilderness at the direct leading of God’s Spirit.
Before the test by the devil begins, Jesus fasts forty days and forty nights, recalling two similar tales from the Hebrew Bible, where Moses fasts for the same length of time before seeing YHWH on a mountain (Deut.9:18) and Elijah for the same time before meeting his God on another mountain (1 Kings 19:8). In this way Matthew anticipates the later transfiguration event where Moses and Elijah confer with Jesus on still another mountain. After Jesus finally becomes hungry after his heroic fast, the “tester” (Matthew uses another word here than “devil”) begins the tests with the claim “If you are the Son of God (the reader has just learned that he is exactly that!), then tell these stones to become bread” (Mt.4:3). Jesus’s reply quotes Deut.8:3 (particularly from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, almost exclusively used by Matthew). “Not by bread alone shall anyone live, but by every word coming out of the mouth of God” (Mt.4:4). Thus is this three-pronged test shown to be an essentially a rabbinic one, where Scripture meets Scripture in a battle of holy language, a contest well known by Matthew’s primarily Jewish audience.
The second test occurs in the “holy city,” obviously Jerusalem, though not here named (unlike Luke’s account), where the devil “sets him on a ‘wing’ of the temple, and challenges him to jump off, quoting Ps.90:11-12, which says that the angels that “God has given charge of you” will save you from the fall (Mt.4:5-6). The word I have translated “wing” is often read as “pinnacle” (NRSV), though the word is a diminutive formed from the word “wing,” perhaps an echo of the famous line from Ps.91:4 where God’s protection appears in the form of God’s wings. Jesus’ scriptural retort is from Deut.6:16, where Israel is said to have “tested YHWH, though the direct reference to the test at Massah and Meribah (Ex.17:1-7) is not included here in Matthew, but is found in the Septuagint of Deut.6:16. Jesus, unlike Israel, refuses to test his God.
The final test says that the devil leads Jesus to “a very high mountain,” the scene of so many ancient events in the life of Israel, and shows him “all the kingdoms of the world and all their glory” (Mt.4:8). This is hardly to be taken literally, no more than YHWH’s leading Moses to Mt. Nebo supposedly able to see the “whole land of Israel” (Deut.34:1-4). The point in both places is that a panoramic view of “all Israel” and “all the world’s kingdoms” is possible only in one’s imagination. All this, says the devil to Jesus, will be yours “if you fall down and pay homage to me” (Mt.4:9). No dice, says Jesus, because Deut.6:13 makes it plain that “you shall pay homage to the Lord your God, and worship him alone” (Mt.4:10). This is, of course, very close to the central claim of Israel, found in Deut.6:4: “Hear, O Isreal, YHWH is our God, YHWH alone.”
Behind the statement of Jesus’ divine Sonship is his direct solidarity with the same Israel addressed by Moses in his sermon to them in Deut.6-8. Though Jesus passes his tests from the devil, and does not test the Lord, unlike Israel who did, without those references to the Israelite wilderness stories, this famous confrontation between Jesus and the devil loses all context in the Israelite past and thus floats loosely in the tale constructed by Matthew. We modern readers need this larger scriptural context to make fuller sense of this important story.
As we enter another Lenten season, we are reminded that our Lord Jesus was tempted as we are, to be led by our appetites, our desire for independent power, and our willingness to worship anything other than God as we make our way through the world God has given us. Jesus is our model as we strive to resist these very real and deeply attractive temptations on our journey finally to become children of the God who has called us.