What does Tribe teach about easter preparation?

At Tribe, the teaching on Easter preparation centers on slowing down long enough to feel the weight of what Holy Week actually is. In the message on Psalm 22, Brian walked the congregation through a psalm David wrote a thousand years before the crucifixion, showing how precisely its details map onto the events of Good Friday: the cry of abandonment, the mocking crowd throwing words back at the sufferer, bones out of joint, hands and feet pierced, soldiers casting lots for clothing. The point was not to compile a checklist of fulfilled prophecy, but to sit with the strangeness and the distance of it. Brian kept returning to that thousand-year gap, asking people not to rush past it as though it were nothing.

The teaching also pressed into what Jesus was doing when he cried from the cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' Brian explained that rabbis regularly quoted the opening line of a psalm and trusted their listeners to hear the rest of it in their heads. Anyone who knew the Torah would have known that Psalm 22 does not end in abandonment. It ends in vindication and praise. So Jesus on the cross was not only expressing real desolation, he was pointing forward to the whole arc of the psalm, and by extension to resurrection.

The image of the bulls of Bashan gave the congregation a way to see what was spiritually arrayed against Jesus at the cross. On one level a bull was simply the most unstoppable force anyone in David's world could picture. On another level Baal, the God worshiped by the nations surrounding Israel, was represented as a bull, so the phrase carried a shorthand for dark, demonic opposition. Brian connected Bashan geographically to Caesarea Philippi, the region Jesus's contemporaries called the Gates of Hell, tying the ancient psalm to the very territory where pagan and spiritual darkness had long been concentrated. Easter preparation at Tribe, then, is less about getting ready for a celebration and more about understanding what was actually defeated.

Taught from Psalm 22 · Deuteronomy 3 · Genesis 6 · Genesis 3 · 1 Corinthians 1:8