Knowing Jesus

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John 10:11-18

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 5^th 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.

The Lord Is Our Pastor

Text: John 10:11-18
Audio Recording

Whenever a church comes into a new relationship with a new minister the question of what that new minister would like to be called always comes up and we are fooling ourselves if we do not appreciate it as a sensitive topic.  Speaking for the larger church most ministers these days do not want to be addressed by anything other than their name.  We don’t want a title because that makes us appear “entitled” or rather sets us apart from the rest of God’s people as if we are more holy, more special, or somehow closer to God.  It is a rule of thumb that  if a minister demands a title then you’re probably dealing with more ego than you want.  It is especially strange for us when you consider that most ministers in Mainline churches today are among the youngest people in the church.  I should be called “Sonny Boy”, not Reverend or Doctor.  We feel the same about wearing collars and robes.  The only reason I wear a collar on Sunday and other occasions is that I was raised to respect my elders and I know the elder church likes to see a collar.  I only wear the robe for high holy days.  I take Jesus as my lead there.  We don’t know exactly what he wore, but we can be reasonably sure that he did not dress like a Scribe, or a Pharisee, or a Priest.  The ministerial garb and titles, in my not so humble opinion, crosses the line into the realm of religion and superstition that Jesus confronted vehemently. 

But back to the topic at hand, people did call Jesus “Rabbi” which meant “Teacher” or “Rabboni” which was a term of endearment for a teacher.  This fact would seem to indicate that some titular designation is in order.  This is particularly so if there are young children in the church for many parents will want their children to respect the minister and will ask what title they should use and we have to respect that request.  Personally, I prefer simply to be called by my name, Randy…although, there is an unfortunate connotation there – the randy minister.  Down in West Virginia most people just called me “the preacher”.  Where kids are involved “Preacher Randy” is fine.  That said, you may call me want you want, but please don’t call me Pastor or Pastor Randy.  I’ll explain. 

Back when I was working on that Doctor of Ministry degree one day in class we were discussing the role of the “pastor” in the early church.  It seems that the early church liked to think of Jesus as being “the Pastor.”  Pastor, if you’re wondering, is just an alternate word for Shepherd.  Jesus called himself the Good Shepherd and indicated that all the other shepherds or leaders in the church were secondary to him.  It was the role of the pastor (actually overseer or elder are the New Testament terms) in the early church to point to the True Pastor, Jesus, and not to be “The Pastor.”  The pastor of the congregation was simply to feed the flock meaning teach them.

I think the Old Order Mennonites and the Amish are good examples of this.  They will pick a preaching “elder” by lot from among the “elders” of the community to shoulder the burden of the preaching responsibility for the community and this on top of fulltime farming work.  They believe that the whole congregation embodies Jesus, “the Pastor”, and they in the way they care for each other carry out Jesus’ ministry and this is especially true for the governing elders as a whole.  The preaching pastor just feeds the flock for a set amount of time so that no one person becomes forever identified with that role.  In my deep down heart of hearts, I can’t help but feel that the way they do it is the way it ought to be: Jesus ministry embodied by the whole community yet especially among the ruling elders of whom one of them takes the preaching/teaching office for a short period of time.

Now let me back up again to my discomfort with the title “Pastor”.  One of my classmates in the discussion that day shared that his wife was studying to become a counsellor and as part of her training she had to take a class in pastoral care.  She came home from that particular class one day livid.  He inquired.  She responded, “You guys just think you’re God.”  Now, having attended a few of these pastoral care classes myself, I knew exactly what she meant.  I remember one of my pastoral care professors saying to us “like it or not people will associate your presence with God’s presence particularly when they are in some sort of crisis like being in the hospital.  Be aware of that.” 

Honestly, sometimes ministers are too aware of this and we let it go to our heads.  We start to believe that Jesus cannot do his work without us.  Instead of pointing you folks to the One True Pastor, we usurp his place and in his place then has arisen the myth that a church isn’t a real church without a collar-wearing professional minister or as of late an articulate rockstar wearing a headset and blue jeans.  The result of this is that at one extreme we wind up with a congregation that is what could be called “a cult of personality” where instead of being a living extension of the person of Jesus Christ it just simply becomes the extension of the personality of its minister; a minister who is very good at eliciting, indeed manipulating, certain “religious affections” or experiences out of people.  When that minister leaves, the crowds that followed move on to the next best thing at the church across town.  Those who stay crucify whoever comes next.  At the other extreme of this usurpation of Jesus rightful place as our One True Pastor is that congregations demand we do it.  After all, you’re paying us for something, right?  No matter the extreme, when Jesus’ ministry gets usurped by ministers the fatal result is that his ministry withers away from its rightful place of being embodied in and by the people of God through the work of the Holy Spirit.

So, what then is it that a minister is supposed to do if not everything?  Notable in the Presbyterian Church is our requirement for seminary-trained ministers.  We have an educated clergy because we believe that it is the responsibility of the seminary-trained minister to preserve and pass on to the whole church first and foremost the Gospel of Jesus Christ, proper worship particularly in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper and Baptism, proper interpretation of the Bible, the theology and tradition of the church, and “soul care”.  Ministers are teaching elders meant to equip a church for ministry and to prevent the church from withering in superstition.  The only thing specific that the Presbyterian Church in Canada has to say about the work of the minister is that we are in congregations as the extension of Presbytery as the moderator (not CEO) of the Session and that we are responsible for the content and conduct of worship.  This means then that everything else that congregations have come expect from their paid minister—the sole responsibility for pastoral care, Lee Iacocca-like leadership, and expertise on everything from Leviticus to toilet replacement realizing that toilet replace is more important—all that is actually the responsibility of the Session of which the minister is only Moderator and teacher. 

If we want a job specific title to tag onto a Presbyterian Church in Canada minister it would be either Moderator or simply Teacher, but definitely not Pastor. “The Lord is my Shepherd”, wrote King David.  Another way of saying that is “The Lord is my Pastor.”  Jesus provides for your every need.  He gives you rest.  He protects and comforts you when you walk in the valley of the shadow of death.  He sets a table before you—he blesses you with a feast—in the face of your enemies.  He has made it so that you—each of you—do dwell in God’s house all the days of your lives.  Indeed, he is always with you.

Jesus said, “I am the Good Shepherd.  The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”  Jesus is the one who loves us so much that he gave his life for us.  He lived in our place the faithful and obedient life that we cannot possibly live.  He suffered death to free us from death.  God raised him from the dead so that all Creation will be made new.  Jesus prays for us continually.  His whole life is for us.  I’m just one of the hired hands.  I’m likely to flee when the wolf comes.  Jesus defeated the wolf.  Try as I may it is humanly impossible for me to truly and sincerely care for anybody but myself.  We’re all like that.  But Jesus, he cares for you and you only.  When you are ill.  He’s with you, in you, praying for your health and restoring it to you.  When you are sad and defeated he is there comforting you.  When you are excelling he is there proud of you, cheering you on.  When you slip and falter, he is your faithfulness and your forgiveness.  Jesus is your Pastor.  I hope you will accept Him, talk to him, listen to him, heed him.  And remember, you each have a share in his ministry to share with each other.  Elders, you especially remember that.  Amen.