Matthew 4:1–11
Today’s text on the temptation of Jesus offers a lens on temptations that we see at play in immigration policy.
In order to see the parallels, we have to understand what the temptations that the tempter presents to Jesus really are.
The first temptation is security: the tempter tells Jesus to command the stones to be loaves of bread (4:3), to use his own power to meet his basic need for food. The temptation here, is to turn aside from God’s mission of love due to our fears that our own needs will not be met.
This is the same temptation we see when the tempters in our midst tell us: “immigrants are taking your jobs.” We fear that migration is a threat to our ability to have our own needs met. We fear that there will not be enough, that we will go hungry or be unable to succeed, if we are open to welcoming others. The temptation is to turn aside from God’s mission of love and welcome in order to make sure our own needs are met.
The second temptation, when the tempter tells Jesus to throw himself from the temple, is to claiming himself as “special”: the temptation is that Jesus will believe that his messianic status grants him the right to ask God for supernatural favors, “to put the Lord to the test” (4:7) for his own benefit and to prove his own identity.
The temptation, in our terms, is to view our identity as worthy of special protection, beyond the rights of every person to dignity and identity. The “specialness” offered by the tempter to Jesus is what we see in calls to oppose immigration in order to “protect Western culture” (a white supremacist talking point that has sadly become more and more common among people in power). The temptation is seeing our own culture as something “special,” not in the sense of receiving our identity and culture as gifts from God within God’s diverse and beautiful creation, but as seeing our own culture as something particularly favored by God over other cultures, and worthy of supposed protection at the cost of love for our neighbors. For Jesus, the temptation is to turn his identity from something always aimed at his mission of love for others to something he uses for his own benefit or power. For us, the parallel temptation is to tie up the value we find in our own identity in a hierarchy or competition with other identities and cultures, and so to let ourselves be distracted from our mission of love and solidarity by seeking to establish ourselves to our own benefit.
The third temptation of Jesus is control over all the nations of the world, if he will only worship the tempter (4:9). We see this temptation in every effort to control borders and migration, to control what constitutes the boundaries and character of a nation. We too can have such control, but only at the cost of losing our fidelity to God and God’s way of welcome and love!
Jesus rejects these temptations, reaffirming his faithful commitment to the path that God has taken in him. While his temptations are not “about” migration, but instead about his messianic identity, we can see parallels from the temptations to the ways we are drawn away from God’s way of welcome.
We also see the opposite of these temptations in the Migration With Dignity principles. Migration With Dignity affirms our right to have our basic needs met, to have our identity valued and respected, to participation in civic life and decision-making over nations and policies. But it does not affirm those things at the cost of others, but instead as part of our commitment to God’s way of love. May we reject temptations and remain faithful, as Jesus did.
Hannah Bowman is a member of the Episcopal Migration Caucus who lives in Los Angeles, the founder of Christians for the Abolition of Prisons, and the author of Abolition Ecclesiology: A Spatial Theology for a Church Against Prisons (forthcoming from Fortress Press in November 2026).