What does Tribe teach about vulnerability?

At Tribe, the teaching on vulnerability is rooted in two Gospel scenes where a woman enters a room full of people with reputation and power and acts anyway. Brian has used both Mark 14 and Luke 7 to show that the woman in each story had something the religious insiders in the room did not: clarity about who Jesus was, born out of a willingness to be fully known and fully exposed. She did not wait for a safer moment or a more private setting. That transparency, Brian argues, is not incidental to her closeness with Jesus. It is what made the closeness real.

The teaching draws a hard line between proximity and intimacy. As Brian puts it, "Proximity does not necessarily equal intimacy." The disciples were physically present with Jesus in Mark 14 and still missed what was happening entirely. Simon the Pharisee in Luke 7 hosted Jesus at his own table and still misread both Jesus and the woman standing between them. Meanwhile, the woman, who carried a public reputation that would have given anyone else a reason to stay away, was the one with actual clarity. The teaching holds that vulnerability is not a personality trait some people happen to have. It is the thing that makes intimacy possible, and intimacy is what produces clarity.

The question Brian put to the room is a personal one: if Jesus already knows everything about you and still wants to be close to you, what does that tell you about him? He framed it this way, "If he already knows and he still wants to hang out with you, what does that say about him?" The point being that vulnerability before Jesus is not a risk in the way it might be with other people. The woman with the alabaster flask understood that. The Pharisee, protecting himself with an answer of "I suppose," did not.

Taught from Mark 14:1-9 · Luke 7:36-50 · James 4:8