THE temptation of Jesus by the devil is an opportunity to think about meaning in scripture. It reveals that even Satan (Matthew’s version — not Luke’s — gives the devil this name) can quote scripture, and that disagreement about scripture is not only an occupation for disputatious humanity.

One lesson in this Gospel is that there are right and wrong ways to apply scripture. The devil’s use of Deuteronomy and the Psalms is not a quest for truth, but a bid for control. We have no difficulty in dismissing his take as “wrong”. Conversely, other interpretations can be “right”. It cannot be that Jesus and the devil have views that are equally valid. Bible truth is not simply in the eye of the beholder.

There is a puzzle in verse 13, which the NRSV renders “The Devil. . . departed from him until an opportune time.” The Greek word kairos has taken on a life of its own in Christian thinking. In Greek, it can mean an “opportune time”, or “right time”. But it can also mean a “proportion”, “season”, “opportunity”, and even “profit”.

For Christians, however, “opportune/right time” becomes not just one option among many, but a predominant one. Perhaps this is because it supports belief in divine providence in human history: that things happen when it is the right time for them to do so.

In this Gospel passage, taking kairos to mean “an opportune time” provides a splendidly menacing end to the episode, although the commentator Joseph Fitzmyer is unconvinced. “This”, he says, “reads more into the text than it can bear.”

Yet we are always reading more into the text than it can bear. It is practically the definition of scripture that a given text, at a given moment, contains different kinds and levels of communication. When the Deuteronomists compiled the book of the law named after them, they did not know that Jesus — or Q, or Matthew, or Luke, or followers of Matthew or Luke (all possible originators of the quotation, according to assorted commentators) — would turn 8.3 (“not on bread alone is man to live”, Fitzmyer’s translation) into a challenge in the mouth of God’s Son.

For them, it meant what it said in their time, to their people: that they must learn the lesson — and live by the precept — that God had fed his people with manna while they wandered in the wilderness, to teach them to live not just for food, but for him.

When Luke’s Jesus replies to the devil, he mentions only the first part of the verse from Deuteronomy. The full quotation, in Matthew’s version, reads, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.” Some scribes — predictably — “improved” what they copied, making Luke say the same as Matthew. The shorter version, though, is likely to be the original.

Did Luke expect his readers to know the whole saying? If so, why leave them to supply it for themselves? Why not complete the sentence, as those later scribes did, like a Harry Enfield comedy character: “You don’t want to write it like that!”?

It is a commentator’s calling to hunt for statistical, textual, and linguistic parallels for the translation of kairos; or for Luke’s recording of a short version of the Deuteronomy verse. Whether he quoted in full, or began the verse expecting that hearers would complete it for themselves, Jesus is saying that the sustenance of ordinary food is not enough for us. It adds a dimension, if we recall the allusion to manna: not even “angels’ food” (Psalm 78.25 AV) can sustain us, without God’s word as well.

So, Luke’s Jesus teaches the same truth as Matthew’s Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “Is not life more than food?” (6.25). That is insight enough into the Lord’s priorities. Kairos can mean “a right moment, an opportune time”, even if it means that Luke exercised a literary artist’s right to stretch the boundaries of meaning, sending words forth in new ways, with new resonances.

In any case, words do not live in isolation. Add in the word “until” (achri), and kairos then has to mean something expressive of a moment when one state of affairs gives way to another. It is the word “until” that makes “opportune time” the right translation, and that makes us wait for Satan’s next step — evil contending against good — as we count down the days to Passiontide.