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What is it to know another person? Can we really know someone? In all honesty, we can’t even know ourselves all that well. I mean, how many times in our lives do we surprise ourselves by doing or saying things we never thought we would do or say. To give you an example, when I was a child, I always thought of myself as not the bullying type. But then one day, I was maybe in the 5th grade. I found myself with one of my best friends chasing another one of my best friends with sticks in hand aiming to beat the kid because we thought it would be fun. I never thought I was the type to do that but apparently, I have it in me. As adults, how many times have we done things we felt questionable or flat out wrong just to position ourselves better. But then there are those times when the feathers hit the fan and like heroes we rise to the occasion and shock ourselves and everybody around us with courage and excellence that we didn’t know we had in us. Really, we truly don’t know ourselves.
So, if we cannot really know ourselves then how can we think we could ever really know another person? What is it to know another person anyway? I would say part of knowing someone else is learning their patterns so that we can somewhat predict their actions, reactions, and maybe their feelings. Moreover, knowing another involves learning their personal boundaries; what we can and cannot do around them. To get to know another involves communication; especially listening as they tell us what is going on inside of them but even then, all we can do is imagine what it must be like to be them. We simply can never ever know what is really going on inside another person; what it’s like to be them.
Martin Buber, a much-respected Jewish Bible scholar and philosopher summed up very well what it is we know when we think we know someone. He said we know only the change that another person has brought about in us. If someone makes me angry, all I can say about them is that what they have done or are doing has made me angry. It takes a long time and a lot of interactions before I can make the assumption that there is something intrinsically about them that they will always p*#s me off.
Not being able to really know someone makes us wonder what we mean when we say those three magic words, “I love you”. If I can’t really know you, how can I love you? If that’s the case, then that means my feelings of love for you are nothing more than infatuation, which is being in love with my imaginations of you. Unless what we mean by “I love you” is a much richer form of love that sounds like “You can trust me to lay myself aside for you so that I will enjoy, tolerate, even suffer the impact you have on me with the result that I will change for your good and the good of this relationship.” Love is more than a feeling I have. Love is a promise to be faithfully for someone.
Now having said all that, what does Jesus mean when he says “I know my own and my own know me just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. Indeed, I lay aside my life for the sheep”? First off, the Bible indicates to us that God the Father Son and Holy Spirit knows us better than we know ourselves and, you know, that should be comforting. God knows us better than we know ourselves because God made us, but more so as Christ Jesus, God the Son laid himself aside and became one of us to personally know what it is like to be us in all our sin-sickened glory. He even came to know what death is. Just as we die, he died. This act of love, of laying himself aside and allowing himself to be changed for us was to make us fully to be who God created us to be.
Hearing about Jesus and what he did we get some insight into who God is and what love is. But there’s more. God the Holy Spirit comes to live in us so that we feel God and the love God has for us and this power of love begins to change us to be who God created us to be. That the person God wants me to become happens as a result of what God is doing in me more so than me having to figure out who God wants me to be and then fail miserably at trying to become that person is totally reassuring. Our primary task in life is to try to get to know this God (Father Son Holy Spirit) who loves us, loves us each. As we struggle to get to know Jesus through prayer, and study, and worship, and fellowship, and trying to be faithful, we change to be more like him because the Holy Spirit with a still small voice and a peaceful sometimes convicting presence is in us teaching us and making us able to become the person God wants us to be.
Let’s talk a little more on what it is to know Jesus. Well, language lesson time. There are two words in Greek for knowing. The first is oida and it is the word that is typically used when speaking of knowing another person. It means you have observed who they are and have learned a bit of what they are about in life and therefore you go along with them or not. Therefore, to know Jesus in this sense is to have knowledge of his kingdom mission and it further means we subject ourselves to him and serve that mission. When Peter denied knowing Jesus (Lk 22) on the night Jesus was arrested, he told the woman who recognized him, “Woman, I do not know him.” The word for “know” that he used was “oida so that he was saying “I do not know him. I am not part of what that Jesus guy was up to.” Oida acknowledges that we cannot know the inner workings of another person, only their externals, only what they choose to reveal.
The second word is gynosko and it is the Apostle John’s favourite term for describing our relationship to Jesus. It suggests having a personal fellowship with him that is more than externals. It is to have union with Jesus in the Holy Spirit so that we know him from the inside-out rather than from the outside-in. It is to know him in such a deep, inwardly way that we share in Jesus the Son’s relationship with God the Father. He knows the Father as the steadfastly loving and faithful one whom he adores and obeys. And so for us, that is all we know of the Father and how we also respond to him. To know Jesus is to know ourselves as a beloved child of a steadfastly faithful, loving Father whom we come to feel love for and want to do as God asks.
Jesus also shows us that the proper response to the Father’s love and faithfulness is for us to love as Jesus first loved us. We lay ourselves aside for others so that their lives may also become complete in him. The Jesus we know is the Jesus who lays aside his entire person for us so that we can know him as the one who lays himself aside for us that we might have life.
To say this another way, when we know ourselves to be a beloved child of God, then we know Jesus. When we know the Father’s faithfulness to us, we know Jesus. When we want nothing more in life than to simply be and do what God wants, then we know Jesus. When we feel the peaceful presence, guidance, and strengthening of the Holy Spirit, we know Jesus. These are all things he felt. This is what it felt like to be him. I’ll not go into how it was when he felt denial, betrayal, and abandonment. We can only know people by their externals, but what the Trinity reveals to us of himself is his internals, his very, very self.
Our knowing of Jesus becomes complete in faithfulness and obedience; when we become those who love others. To know someone is to do as they do. Back to Peter’s denial – fear overcame him and led him to deny knowing Jesus. Yet, in the end, Peter died by being crucified upside down because he said he was not worthy to die in the same way his Lord had died. How did this change from denying Jesus to knowing him happen? Peter went from simply knowing the externals of Jesus to being brought into knowing the internals of God the Trinity through union with Jesus in the Holy Spirit and sharing Jesus’ relationship with the Father. That change in the way of knowing Jesus led to Peter’s serving Jesus even unto an excruciating death. Peter could no longer deny the one whom he knew and the one who knew him so deeply. The more we know of his love, of him, the more we change and do as he did.
I don’t know about you folks but pondering this passage of Scripture makes me hungry spiritually. It is a rare person who does not hunger for this sort of knowing another and being known by another. Intimacy is the word for it. We want to be known from the inside out. We want another to share in who we ourselves are, to share our burdens and our joys. In Jesus is the only relationship in which this can happen. So, open up devotional time in our lives for prayer, Bible reading and study, and Christian fellowship. Let there be an empty chair next to you for God to sit in. I think that makes it easier to be open to God’s Presence. Prayerfully pour your heart out to him. Pray for the people and the situations that concern you. You will also find that God will place people and situations on your heart that you will feel compelled to pray for a period of time. Make a daily practice of reading the Bible itself, not just a devotional. We learn God’s voice when we read Scripture. The time we spend with the Father Son and Holy Spirit mysteriously changes and equips us to lay ourselves aside so that we can truly love spouses, family, friends, neighbours, and even strangers. Amen.
