Lent 1 2026

Matthew 4.1-11

One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. 

Credit where credit is due. This saying—one of Jesus’s most famous, even among nonChristians—predates him by at least five hundred years, if not more. It comes from the Book of Deuteronomy.

The Book of Deuteronomy is largely written the voice of Moses, as a series of his final speeches to the people of Israel before they cross into the Promised Land. He begins by recounting some of their wanderings in the wilderness, before spending the vast majority of the text on expositions of the Law, beginning with the Ten Commandments and much more besides. At the end of the book, Joshua is appointed his successor just before the great prophet dies without himself entering the Promised Land. 

Here’s the bit with the quoted phrase, Deuteronomy 8.3: 

He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

There is something odd about this. One does not live by bread alone. We always take this to mean that there is more to life—Jewish, Christian, or otherwise—than physical necessities and pleasures. And yet, the context of the saying is in a reminder of how God literally fed the people of Israel with manna from heaven. In the morning, they found on the ground the flaky stuff, fine as frost, white like coriander seed, tasting like wafers made with honey. They bake it into cakes; Moses calls the heavenly food bread. 

Remember, that once upon a time, God fed you bread from heaven; therefore, know that you live not by bread alone. It makes no sense!—certainly not if we assume a strong distinction, even opposition between the physical and the spiritual.

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Dualism is the name that philosophers give to any view that metaphysically divides something into two. That is, distinctions for conceptual convenience don’t count: dualists really think that there are really two things going on, two sides, two aspects, two properties—whatever. The dualism most familiar is that between the physical and spiritual; or the body and the soul; or, for people who feel queasy about talk of souls and spirits, we might say the body and the mind, though the English word we use for the scientific study of the mind—psychology—comes from the Greek, psyche, which just means “soul”. 

There are many versions of body-soul or body-mind dualism. Perhaps the most intuitive is the idea that human persons are made up of two kinds of stuff: physical stuff—our flesh and bones—and spiritual stuff, which is mysterious and somehow radically different, so that, for example, our souls can survive the death of our bodies. A subtly different version of this idea stipulates that there is only one kind of stuff, but the complex organisation of human bodies—and especially human brains—somehow gives rise to nonphysical properties, especially consciousness. For reasons that are somewhat opaque to me, secular philosophers find this dual-property view more palatable than the dual-stuff or dual-substance view. 

Dualism is not just a metaphysical theory about the nature of things; more often than not, it also carries moral connotations. The moral views are usually not, strictly speaking, logically entailed by the metaphysical views; but they seem, in the minds of many people, to be closely related. 

For much of the history of Western thought, the distinction between body and soul had led to people privileging the soul over the body. This long predates Christianity; and, indeed, to the extent that the New Testament perpetuates a bias against the body in preference for the soul, it is doing so under the influence of Platonic philosophy. Pagan philosophers of various kinds—Platonist and otherwise—emphasised mental activities and achievements as constitutive of the Good Life. For some, it was contemplation and knowledge; for others, it was emotional equanimity. Even the Epicureans, sometimes accused of being hedonists, distinguished between physical and mental pleasures, and preferred the latter. 

Christianity did inherit some of this; it’s certainly all over St Paul’s writings. But this tradition of thought also sits alongside a strong impulse to push back against the basic distinction than underlies it, that between the physical and spiritual. 

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There is a question sometimes raised in conversations about Christian mission, which most sensible Christians answer the same way. One version of the question is: should we prioritise evangelism—the sharing of the good news of Jesus Christ—or practical aid, including the feeding of the poor, the curing of the sick, the visiting of the imprisoned. And most sensible Christians reject the disjunction: Christians are called to do both. That this is so is itself a rejection of the dualism that pits body against soul, and specifically the body’s needs and the soul’s. Both need to be nourished.

It is not for nothing also that our paradigmatic act of nourishing the soul is the Eucharist, in which we take into our bodies some physical substances, wine and—there it is again—bread. 

It is not for nothing that our credal affirmations do not emphasise the “immortality of the soul” but the “resurrection of the body” or, more generally, the “resurrection of the dead”. It is not the postmortem survival of a metaphysical part of the human person that is the content of Christian hope, but the raising to life by God a complete person, understood to be irreducibly physical and spiritual. 

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This is why Lenten disciplines involve more than mental activities, more than prayer and meditation—though both are well worthwhile to do. They also involve more than learning some theology at a Lent Course, thought that too is worthwhile—I hope. 

As we all know, in Lent we engage in embodied practices: we give up foods and drinks, we take up specific acts of practical goodness. Living in Lent requires us to interact with the world with our bodies. 

This too can be found in the Book of Deuteronomy. One does not live on bread alone—remember that God fed you, says Moses. And he goes on—and really, goes on and on—to exhort the people of Israel never to forget the Lord and what the Lord has done. And he says that the sign and proof of their not forgetting is their obedience to the Lord’s commands: which consist of more embodied disciplines than you can shake a stick at. 

One does not live by bread alone. It turns out not to be an assertion that the physical doesn’t matter, but that it is much more than it seems. Bread is never just bread. It is an invitation to live as God intended.