Some Christians would like to see faith as an intellectual exercise, going no further than acceptance of certain truths as divinely revealed. Others want to use faith as a tool to manipulate the Divine Mind around to their own way of thinking and the mold the Divine Will to conform to their own desires. The image of a shepherd and his sheep, as given by Jesus in Jn 10, draws us above these mechanical and self-serving conceptions of faith.
Faith is a matter of belonging.
Thus the words of Jesus cannot be accepted on the basis of human argumentation and reasoning. Our experience of human friendship tells us this. Only if we take the trouble to accept the other person into the fabric of our lives in a sense to belong to him or her can we say that we are beginning to know him or her. Without such a commitment, knowledge cannot reach the inner person of the other because we would not really care about the inner person of the other. In today s Gospel reading, Jesus opens up the other side of that relationship as well.