What Do You Claim in Your Unknowingness?

There is a claim people make with extraordinary ease.

“I have an intimate relationship with Jesus.”

The claim itself is not the problem.

The question is whether we have examined what we mean by relationship.

Strip away religion for a moment.

Strip away doctrine, worship, prayer, church, Scripture, and inherited language.

Take two ordinary human beings.

Could one of them reasonably say,

*I have an intimate relationship with this person,*

while admitting that they do not know who that person is?

Something immediately becomes unstable.

Because relationship contains knowing.

Not complete knowing.

No human being completely knows another.

But there must be enough encounter with the actual person that what is being related to is no longer merely an assumption, an expectation, an idea, or a projection.

There must be recognition.

There must be differentiation between:

what I imagined you to be,

and who you are.

Between:

what I wanted from you,

and what you actually gave.

Between:

what I expected you to say,

and what you actually said.

Relationship becomes real when the other is permitted to exist outside the architecture we constructed for them.

And intimacy goes further.

Intimacy is not intensity.

It is not how strongly I feel.

It is not how frequently I speak about you.

It is not how passionately I defend you.

It is not even how much information I possess about you.

Intimacy is what becomes possible when knowing deepens.

When the other becomes recognizable.

When I have encountered them enough to begin to know their character.

Their movements.

Their refusals.

Their tenderness.

Their boundaries.

Their way of being.

And this is where the question returns to Jesus.

Not as accusation.

Not as judgment.

As inquiry.

If you claim an intimate relationship with Jesus,

who is Jesus?

Not who you were told He is.

Not who your denomination says He is.

Not who your family required Him to be.

Not the Jesus constructed from fear.

Not the Jesus constructed from politics.

Not the Jesus constructed from culture.

Not the Jesus who conveniently agrees with every conclusion you have already reached.

Who is He?

And how do you know?

The question is not designed to expose ignorance.

Ignorance is not shameful.

Unknowingness is not failure.

In fact, unknowingness may be the most honest beginning of relationship.

Every person we have ever loved was once unknown to us.

There was a moment before knowing.

A moment before familiarity.

A moment before recognition.

The problem is not that we begin in unknowingness.

The problem begins when unknowingness acquires the language of certainty.

When the unknown is spoken about as though fully known.

When assumption becomes authority.

When interpretation becomes voice.

When preference becomes command.

When the sentence

“I believe Jesus would…”

quietly becomes

“Jesus says…”

without examination of what happened between the two.

And perhaps this is where the claim of intimacy deserves particular care.

Because intimacy should make projection more difficult.

The more deeply we know another person, the less freedom we have to invent them.

Knowing corrects us.

A real person interrupts our construction of them.

They surprise us.

They contradict what we assumed.

They reveal dimensions we had not anticipated.

Eventually, if we truly know them, we become capable of saying:

No.

That does not sound like him.

I misunderstood him.

I assumed something that was never there.

I was wrong about who he was.

This is not the collapse of relationship.

It may be evidence that the other has become sufficiently real to correct our perception of them.

Perhaps knowing Jesus must contain the same possibility.

The possibility that He is not who we made Him.

The possibility that something we attributed to Him belonged to us.

Our fear.

Our desire.

Our tradition.

Our anger.

Our certainty.

Our need to be right.

Our need to belong.

Our need for God to stand exactly where we are standing.

Perhaps one of the deepest acts of reverence is the willingness to say:

*I may not know You yet in the way I claim to know You.*

Not because there is no relationship.

But because relationship worthy of that name should permit the other to remain other.

To reveal Himself rather than merely confirm what has already been decided about Him.

Perhaps intimacy with Jesus is not demonstrated by how confidently His name is used.

Perhaps it is demonstrated by recognizability.

By the slow reduction of projection.

By the increasing ability to distinguish His character from one's own.

By being changed through encounter rather than simply using Him to validate the self that already existed.

And perhaps there is another question beneath the first.

If Jesus is truly known,

what has knowing Him made recognizable in you?

Not perfection.

Not performance.

Not religious language.

But evidence of contact.

Because intimate relationships leave traces.

People who know one another deeply begin to carry knowledge of one another into the way they move.

Into their decisions.

Into what they tolerate.

Into what they refuse.

Into how they love.

Into how they speak when no one is watching.

Into how they behave when they are wounded.

So before the claim,

“I have an intimate relationship with Jesus,”

perhaps there should be no rush to defend it.

Perhaps there should only be enough stillness to examine it.

Who is the person you say you know?

What have you learned of Him that did not originate in you?

Where has He corrected your construction of Him?

Where have you mistaken your own voice for His?

What remains unknown?

And are you willing to let it remain unknown long enough for knowing to become real?

There is no condemnation in the question.

Only an invitation to honesty.

Because perhaps the beginning of knowing is not certainty.

Perhaps it is the courage to discover how much of the person standing before us has never actually been seen.

And so the question remains:

**What do you claim in your unknowingness?**