Ezekiel 34 is the background to this passage: God condemns the shepherds of Israel who exploit rather than care for the flock and declares that he himself will come as the good shepherd. Jesus has been reading Ezekiel 34 as his own job description. The “I am the good shepherd” is an egō eimi claim placed alongside a prophecy about God himself coming to shepherd. The mutual knowing of shepherd and sheep is modeled on the mutual knowing of Father and Son — which makes the knowing available to the sheep an extension of trinitarian intimacy.

From the writers we read together

Brennan Manning

Franciscan priest and author of The Ragamuffin Gospel (1934-2013)

Manning returned to the good shepherd image throughout his work, and his reading always began with what the shepherd knows. “I know my own” includes knowing their worst. The shepherd knows the sheep that wandered last week and will probably wander again. He knows the sheep that is stubborn about the right pasture and the sheep that keeps falling into the same ravine. He lays down his life for that sheep — the known one, the fully seen one. Manning's gospel for the ragamuffin was rooted in this knowing: you cannot hide from the shepherd, and the shepherd's knowledge has not produced contempt.

The symmetry of verse 15 — “as the Father knows me and I know the Father” — is the measure of the knowing available to the sheep. The intimacy between the Father and the Son is the intimacy into which the shepherd's death gathers the flock. Manning wrote that the deepest need of the ragamuffin is not forgiveness (though they need that too) but to be known and loved anyway. John 10:14-15 is the address of that need: you are known by the shepherd, completely, and he laid down his life for you rather than lose you.