To Know and Be Known

I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.--John 10:14-15

When Jesus asked the Galileans to leave everything behind and take up a new life together with him, he asserted radical change to be at the entrance to the new kingdom he was calling them to. Jesus enveloped his followers in the penetrating example of his own humanity, and he exposed their deepest interior life to the judgment of his teachings.

He knew what was in people's hearts. For three solid years a small group of his countrymen opened themselves to him in profound personal interaction. Their lives were reset for leadership among the new people of God whose corporate birth would happen soon after his own death and resurrection. He was instructing them in an earthly lifestyle based upon otherworldly principles; in so doing he called them not so much to a spiritual revival as to a total environmental revolution.

Jesus' message was a radical one about new birth, never simply a good word about another approach to life. Change, even disruptive change, in every conceivable human circumstance was at the heart of the good news he brought from God, and the word he and his New Testament contemporaries used to denote it was repent: forsake or turn away from.

It would seem that Jesus' immediate disciples had an easier time of change-making or repenting with respect to lifestyle than we do. But they had his physical presence. They slept where he slept, they ate with him, and they followed his lead along the seashore, into the villages and the countryside. His life demonstrated in common, fleshed-out terms the principles of life in another kingdom, the kingdom his Father had given him sole authority to proclaim was coming on earth for all people.

The proclamation took root first in a handful of Galileans who discovered that to walk beside him was to experience the power of those principles and to see the "hidden" kingdom; to hear his words was to have that other world interpreted in the human terms of this life on earth. Not only was Jesus the kingdom's proclaimer, he was uniquely, for these first disciples, the fact of it.

Jesus brought his disciples step by step to another life-concept through a process of repentance and change.

We expect change--change of heart, and change of behavior--to flow from repentance, but the fact that repentance itself should stem from the sort of godly fellowship the disciples enjoyed with Jesus is not so self-evident. Certainly we believe that fellowship with God is a fruit of sin repented, but do we also believe that, once established, fellowship with God is a deterrent to sin and a source of further repentance? We are more apt, I think, to despair of having godly fellowship at a very deep human level because we know what sinners we really are.

The practical result is a kind of self-defeating game of waiting for the one thing our hearts yearn for most (profound human-divine fellowship) because we have yet to reach the state of perfection where we are worthy of it.

Their worth was not the condition of Jesus' fellowship with his disciples: Judas experienced the same personal involvement that Peter and John did. But Judas finally refused repentance.

By this compelling human involvement Jesus drew his disciples from where they were to where he was. And he taught them clearly and simply along every step of the way so that they were in little doubt about who they were in his estimation, how they were motivated, and who he was and how he was motivated. They received from him not only an awareness of what was in their own hearts but an astonishing revelation of what was in his heart. They knew and were known.

Shepherding and Fellowship
For Jesus' first disciples there was an unmistakable content in these words. He was their good shepherd, leading them from the threatening terrain of one human condition (their own) to another (his); from sin to righteousness, from darkness to light. The process of change that was occurring in them was the fruit of repentance--a life of it, not merely a single act. The instrument Jesus used to stimulate their repentance was fellowship--laying down his life for them, freely giving himself over to them in the most profound personal sense, and giving himself over to the world around them for their sake.

Fellowship--repentance--change: this dynamic of discipling, at the heart of which is the wisdom of good shepherding, is the secret to Christian maturity and. growth. John, at the beginning of his first epistle, summarizes it as a pastoral principle and extends it to later generations as both the source of joy and the ground of corrective for spurious spirituality and false teaching.

Yet there was never a whisper about such things during my own generation of pastoral training. In fact not to be known by the flock was subtly held forth as a good professional stance for pastors. Burdensome personal problems could be dealt with "under the stole" or in professional therapeutic sessions. However, I now suspect that there is no more effective way to make disciples of Jesus than to gather men and women together to live in a profound fellowship of godly concern under the leadership of open, defenseless, fully "given" pastoral leaders.

When Christ's pastors establish such a milieu for the flock entrusted to them, a dynamic of repentance begins and growth in grace propels the flock toward wisdom and maturity. This pastoral milieu is the indispensable ground of fellowship out of which a life of repentance arises and without which there can be no real growth in Christ. The fact that it is a gift from the good shepherd to every one of his sheep gives answer to the query whether or not the first disciples had an edge on the rest of us. What the historic presence of Jesus in his flesh gave to them, a pastoral milieu will give to us.

These assertions are made after ten years of involvement with communitarian redevelopment trials in church life and ministry both in the United States and abroad. As I have said, such thoughts were not even whispered in the halls of the seminary where I received my formal pastoral training. Nor are they regarded very highly in such places today.

In this mobile age we are so easily engrossed in the institutional forms and large structures of our environment that the simple and immediate can be overlooked, and much in our lives is passed as private when in reality it is simply uninvestigated.

This is precisely what Jesus prevented from happening to his disciples by pulling them close to his bosom; their whole being was brought to his personal judgment and washed in his word. So must ours be if we would practice good shepherding.

Graham Pulkingham, formerly rector of the Church of the Redeemer in Houston, Texas, was a leader of the Community of Celebration in Cumbrae, Scotland, when this article appeared.