Knowing Jesus

“I know My own and My own know Me,” Jesus the Good Shepherd says (John 10:14). Then He adds, “even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father” (v. 15).

There’s a neat symmetry here: “I know My own” matches “the Father knows Me”; Jesus as Good Shepherd stands in a paternal relation to His sheep. “My own know Me” matches “I know the Father”; the sheep have a filial relation to the Father. But this ABAB symmetry is tangled with what looks to be an overlapping chiasm:

A. I know

B. Implicit: I am known: “know Me”

B’. Implicit: I am known: “knows Me”

A’. I know

In the chiasm, Jesus knowledge of the Father matches His knowledge of His own sheep; His knowledge of the sheep is analogous to His knowledge of “His own” Father. On the other hand, the Father’s knowledge of the Son matches the sheep’s knowledge of the Shepherd. “My own” sheep know Jesus “even as the Father knows Me.” The sheep have “paternal” knowledge of the Son.

We can make sense of Jesus known His own the way the Father knows Him and the way He knows the Father. We can almost make sense of being granted a filial knowledge of the Father. We can’t quite make sense of Jesus’ promise that we are brought into the intimate circle of the mutual knowledge of Father and Son. But the breathtaking truth is that Jesus’ own sheep know Him in a way that resembles the Father’s knowledge of Him. Jesus is the object of the flock’s knowledge “even as” He is the object of the Father’s loving knowledge.

No one has seen God; the Only Begotten who is in the bosom of the Father has exegeted Him. Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father. The Son reveals the Father so that knowing the Son gives us knowledge of the Father. But knowledge of the Father is not just knowledge of the Father as object of knowing; it involves sharing in the Father’s own knowledge of the Son. Having come to know the Father through the Son, we know the Son through the Father. In Jesus, we are caught up in the dizzying circle that is Triune life.