Kinds of Knowing

Kinds of Knowing--April 29, 2019

"I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead." [Philippians 3:10-11]

There is a difference between knowing a person and knowing about a person. 

I might know several biographical facts about George Washington.  We could even sift out the mythic bits about chopping down cherry trees or not being able to tell a lie.  But even if I commit all the available facts about George Washington to memory, I still will not know the man himself.  The difference between knowing the actual person and just knowing facts about them is the difference between seeing pawprints in the dirt and spotting the actual tiger herself right in front of you with your own eyes.  

On a side note, other languages get this better than English does, and we just have to make do with the blunt tools English offers on this matter.  In Spanish, for example, there are two different verbs for knowing facts (saber) and knowing people (conocer); and in Hebrew, interestingly, the idea of "knowing" can go much further beyond memorizing facts, to include even sexual intimacy (as in, "Adam knew his wife, and she conceived and bore him a son...").  We tend to focus on "knowing" as mastering trivia, and to completely forget about a deeper "knowing" that is not objective and distant but participatory and relational.  That by itself is an insight worth the price of admission.

The difference between mere "knowing about" and genuine, deep "knowing" that is relational is much the same difference between singing a song and just owning the printed sheet music, or between tasting fresh summer cherries and being able to identify one in a photograph or give its Latin name for scientific classification.  The printed page of black lines and dots and the photograph of the red fruit are all well and good, but they were never meant to be the end of the line.  Music is meant to be played, sung, and heard.  Cherries are just begging to be tasted.  Well, humans are more than collections of random facts, too.  The facts of our personal stories, our likes and dislikes, our backgrounds and hopes, these are a part of who we are—but they are meant to be known in relationship, not merely memorized for a test.

It is true whether you are talking about your children, your parents, or your best friend. And it is true if we are talking about Christ.  To be a Christian is not merely to know facts about Jesus—it is to know Jesus himself.  Not fully, not completely, maybe, but truly.  Knowing Jesus may well involve learning things about him along the way. And like a relationship with any other person, we keep learning new things about Jesus because life keeps giving us more experience to learn about. But a friend is not a subject to be “mastered.” And simply memorizing a statement of Jesus-related trivia is not the ultimate goal.  Knowing Jesus himself—opening our lives up to his, and vice versa—is.  It is to participate in Christ's life, his death, and his resurrection.

Note that when Paul talks about all of this, he has the same desire:  “I want to know Christ,” he says—not “I want to know about Christ.”  If Paul would have been satisfied with knowing facts about Jesus, he just could have sat good old Simon Peter down for a talk and gotten biographical data from his brother James.  If it were just a matter of head knowledge on the topic of Jesus, Paul would have been happy enough with just reading a handful of third-person accounts in the Gospels.  

But he isn’t.  When Paul says he wants to “know Christ and the power of his resurrection,” he isn’t saying that he just needs to brush up on the facts of the Easter story.  He is talking about an experiential knowledge—Paul is saying he wants to experience the same kind of power that holds on beyond the grip of death, the way Christ himself came through.  Paul is saying he wants to continue in relationship with Jesus more and more fully so that he actually shares life with Christ himself.  

Sometimes we treat Jesus like a subject to be mastered, akin to geometry or grammar or American history, rather than a person with whom we relate.  And that messes up our whole picture.  The goal of study an academic subject is to become an expert in it. If you are a particle physicist, your job is to discover tinier and tinier pieces of the universe so that you can explain and diagram and chart how the whole thing works—in other words, so you can predict and dissect and even control it.  But when it comes to knowing people (not just knowing about people), the “goal”, if we can even talk that way, is the relationship itself. It is about opening our lives to one another and going through common experiences. (And that is why, to be truthful, the list of people you or I truly know is surely a lot shorter than the list of people we know about.) That cannot be reduced to a list of facts.

In other words, if you ask, “What is the point of knowing biographical information about George Washington?” the answer has to be something like, “To be an expert in history,” or “To be able to understand how he shaped world events,” or “So I can be a civics teacher.”  But if you ask, “What is the point of knowing… your best friend?” well, now things change.  There isn’t a “point,” not exactly—at least not something separable from the relationship itself.  The point of knowing him or her is to know that person.  Knowing about a person may be a stepping stone to get you somewhere else.  Actually knowing a person is its own goal, because the relationship itself has worth.

I wonder how it would change us if we really treated Jesus the same way—not as a subject to be mastered or a frog to be dissected as a means to an end, but as a person with whom we relate and interact now.  I wonder how it might humble us and embolden us at the same time to give up on trying to master Jesus, and instead simply to know him, more and more fully, just because he is worth knowing.  What if we spent today intentionally inviting conversation with Jesus (you know, actually treating him as though he is alive!), rather than thinking we learned all we needed to know about Jesus back in Sunday School or catechism classes or in last week’s sermon?  What would you do with your day, your free moments, your running inner thought life today, to deepen that relationship?  Maybe it’s worth a try today.  The relationship itself has worth.

Jesus, help us to know you more fully today, and to open our lives to yours.  And let that be enough.