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The wonderful preacher and teacher Anna Carter Florence published a book in 2014 called Rehearsing Scripture. Some of you may remember that we did a Lent Group on it shortly after it came out. One of her most helpful suggestions for engaging with Scripture is to pay attention to the verbs, the “doing” words, in a story. Who gets which verbs? Who acts, who reacts, who speaks, who listens? Which verbs come as a surprise – and which are conspicuously missing?

It’s a deceptively simple approach, but it opens up a text in surprising ways.

You see, nouns can sometimes distance us from Scripture. All those strange names of people and places – rivers that we’ve never seen, types of trees that we can’t quite picture, deserts that we’ve never walked. But verbs draw us in. Because you and I, here and now, share verbs with the people in the Bible. We breathe and hunger and desire and doubt. We listen and speak and take and give. We trust and resist and fail and begin again.

And, astonishingly, we share verbs not only with Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, but with God too. In the Incarnation, the Word became flesh. God came to share verbs with us.

All the action

In our verses from Genesis 2, God gets almost all the action. God forms the human from the dust of the ground – earthy, intimate work, with red dirt under divine fingernails. God breathes into the human’s nostrils the breath of life. God plants a garden, puts the human there, makes trees grow that are pleasing to the eye and good for food. God takes and commands and invites.

And the human – well, the human ‘becomes’.

The Hebrew is wonderfully spare. Before the human does anything at all, the human is. Life is received before it is enacted. Breath comes before obedience, relationship before responsibility.

And in words left out of the biblical narrative but vivid in my imagination at least, as the eyes of the human fluttered open, the first thing they would surely have seen is the face of God leaning over them, loving them into being with his breath. Before there is command, there is communion. Before there is choice, there is gift.

Adjectives too

Then, in Genesis 3, the energy of the text shifts. The verbs begin to tumble from mouth to mouth. The snake said. The woman said. She saw. She took. She gave. And he ate. Then they both knew. They sewed. They made.

The pace quickens. The calm, deliberate verbs of God give way to a flurry of human and serpentine activity. There is urgency now, and anxiety, and grasping.

And we mustn’t overlook the adjectives. The writer is playing with words here, delighting in the slipperiness of language. The snake is described as sly, ‘arum in Hebrew, while the woman and the man are naked, ‘arom. ‘Arum and ‘arom. One letter’s difference, but a world apart. The humans know nakedness, vulnerability, openness. The snake knows slyness, manipulation, half-truths. The tragedy is not simply that the humans disobey, but that they begin to desire what they are not made for.

The snake misquotes God, exaggerating the prohibition. The woman, perhaps already unsettled, adds an extra detail: not only must they not eat, they must not touch. The Talmud imagines the snake touching the tree and shaking it until its fruit falls, exposing the fragility of the woman’s trust and creating the opening for doubt.

A different world

And then, almost casually, they ‘ate’. No speech. No hesitation recorded. Just the verb ‘ate’. And suddenly the world is different.

They know, but not in the way they hoped. They see, but not clearly. They sew fig leaves together, the first human attempt at self-protection, at covering shame. And then, in perhaps one of the most tender but saddest moments in Scripture, God comes walking in the garden in the evening breeze and asks a question whose answer God already knows: “Where are you?”

Not “What have you done?” Not “Why did you fail?” But “Where are you?” A question of relationship before judgment. A question God still asks. A question that God asks of you and me. “Where are you?”

Echoes

Another of Anna Carter Florence’s practices is to listen for echoes – where words and ideas reverberate elsewhere in Scripture. Here, the lectionary does that work for us by pairing Genesis with Matthew 4.

Jesus has just been baptised. He has heard that voice from heaven: “This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased.” Identity precedes testing. Love is declared before the wilderness begins.

Matthew opens his Gospel with a genealogy beginning with Abraham. Luke, intriguingly, does the opposite. He waits until just before the temptation story, then traces Jesus’ lineage backwards, ending not with Abraham but with Adam – whom he also calls a son of God. Two sons. Two beginnings. Two moments of testing.

And again, the first temptation is about eating. This time it is bread in a wilderness rather than fruit in a garden. Jesus is not naked, but he is hungry. He is vulnerable in a different way – empty rather than exposed. The devil, just as sly as the serpent, quotes Scripture accurately but without faithfulness, twisting God’s words into tools of pressure.

Vocation

You can look for the verbs yourself this time. But where Adam and Eve doubt God’s generosity, Jesus rests in it.

According to Zechariah, the role of the satan was to test the righteous, not to destroy but to probe (3:1–2). Both Jesus and the devil know who Jesus is. The question is not identity but vocation: what kind of Son will he be? How will he live out his belovedness?

Perhaps the testing clarifies that calling for Jesus. He responds not with spectacle or self-protection, but with Scripture grounded in trust. He chooses dependence over display, faithfulness over force.

In Eden, we succumbed to temptation and fractured our relationship with God. In the desert, Jesus resists temptation and begins to heal that fracture, not by returning to the garden, but by carrying us forward into a new way of being human.

And we are not so different now, are we? As Kae Tempest puts it in Brand New Ancients: “For there’s always been heroes and there’s always been villains, and the stakes may have changed but really there’s no difference.”

Beloved

Unlike Jesus, but just like Adam and Eve, we will fall and fail. We will mishear God, grasp for control, and cover our shame. Lent does not pretend otherwise. But if this season leads us into wilderness spaces – times of hunger, uncertainty, or self-questioning – then perhaps it helps to remember that we share verbs with Jesus.

We too hunger. And we are tested. And we trust – though sometimes haltingly.

And more than verbs, we share that adjective spoken over Jesus at the Jordan and never taken away in the desert.

‘Beloved’.

Before we act, before we fail, before we resist or give in – we are beloved.

And that, finally, is the word that steadies us as we walk our own way this Lent through gardens and through deserts alike. Amen

‘Who gets which verbs?’ was delivered by Ian Banks at Christ Church Walmersley on 22nd February 2026, 1^st of Lent. It was based on Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7 and Matthew 4:1-11

You can see a shorter version of this by Ian in the current edition of The Preacher Magazine. You can get a copy of Anna’s ‘Rehearsing Scripture’ at all good bookshops… or by following this link.