A Stylist’s Confession
I’ve been a hairstylist for 32 years. And if there’s one profession that deals daily in caricature, it’s hairdressing. Clients walk in with AI-generated images, perfect hair, pixel-polished shine, zero humidity. Never mind their hair type, time, budget, or energy. They forget: that image was taken seconds after hours of expert styling, not after life happens. Caricature doesn’t survive heat, gravity, or rain.
What they really want isn’t a hairstyle, it’s a version of themselves they hope to become. But hope built on a lie is a cruel stylist. And the deeper danger? Most of us live that way spiritually too.
Jesus and the Question of Knowingness
In John 10:11–15, Jesus makes a stunning claim:
“I am the good shepherd; and I know My sheep, and am known by My own.”
This isn’t surface-level seeing. It is covenantal knowing, intimacy rooted in identity, not performance. He doesn’t guess your heart. He names it, claims it, and redeems it.
By contrast, the world offers naming without knowing, a dangerous mimicry of intimacy. It gives you a category, a hashtag, a tribe. But it can never give you your name.
What would happen if we stopped asking, “Who sees me?” and started asking, “Who truly knows me?”
Caricatured Identity: Distorted Reflections
A caricature is the exaggeration of features that distorts the whole. It’s not false per se, but it’s never true enough to trust. As one scholar writes, caricature is “not always a lie, but always a limit.”¹
This is what worldly identity systems do. They take a sliver of your story, trauma, race, sexuality, political leaning, success, and enlarge it until it eclipses your soul.
These distorted reflections become “selves” you learn to perform. Carl Jung warned that the archetypes we wear can become masks we forget we’re wearing.²
Is the “you” you show the world just a louder version of a single piece of you?
The Good Shepherd and the Impostors
Jesus continues the metaphor: the hireling flees when the wolf comes. The hireling mimics care, but only the true shepherd sacrifices.
Our culture is filled with hirelings, brands, gurus, influencers, therapists-for-hire, who appear to know us but vanish when knowing us becomes costly. They love the performance, not the person.
By contrast, Jesus lays down His life not for the version of you that earns it, but the real you who cannot.
Do the people who claim to know you pay a price for you? Or are they just hirelings, present until it costs?
Cultural Templates: Modern Caricatures of Self
Here’s where caricature thrives:
* Alpha male/female identity scripts
* Body positivity as branding, not wholeness
* Enneagram numbers replacing transformation
* Left/right-wing clichés as stand-ins for virtue
* Online tribes and fashion-statement labels
* Even prison gangs or identity politics
Pauline Rosenau argues that modern identity is “stabilised performatively by belonging to symbolic ‘difference’ groups.”³ But that stability is an illusion, it performs what it cannot sustain.
These categories aren’t evil. But they’re not enough. They give community but demand conformity. They let you be seen, but never truly known.
Are you free to grow, or is your label your cage?
False Intimacy: The Illusion of Being Known
We live in a world where visibility has replaced vulnerability. But as Hannah Orben and Robin Dunbar show, digital closeness is often an illusion. The more we text, comment, and react, the lonelier we often become.⁴
Psychologists call it the illusion of knowing, we think we know others, or are known, based on shallow cues. But real knowing is participatory, sacrificial, and unafraid of the mess.⁵
Who knows your wounds, not just your wins?
The Church’s Temptation: Holy Caricatures
Let’s not pretend the church is immune.
Sometimes our sermons, speaker reels, and aesthetic worship are more branding than biblical. Testimonies are curated. Worship is choreographed. Jesus becomes a mood board.
But Jesus doesn’t say, “I know My followers.” He says, “I know My sheep.” This is not about platform. It’s about presence.
Have we traded the Shepherd’s voice for Spotify vibes and stage charisma?
Are we following Christ, or a church-approved caricature of Him?⁶
Return to John 10: The Voice That Truly Names
There’s a difference between conferrence and construction. Conferrence is naming that comes from above, from one who has the right. Construction is self-made, self-claimed, and usually fear-driven.
The world demands that we construct our identities. Jesus, by contrast, confers identity. He speaks your name with eternal authority, not according to your pain, politics, or personality, but according to His truth.
He names you:
Not “damaged” but beloved. Not “other” but son, daughter, chosen. Not “category” but called.
Are you building your name, or receiving the one spoken over you before the foundation of the world?
Conclusion: We Are Known
The wolf scatters. The hireling runs. The culture exaggerates, it caricatures.
But the Shepherd stays. He lays down His life for the you behind the mask.
The real miracle is not that God sees you. The miracle is that He knows you, and loves you still.
He knows your name.
Jesus loves you. Let Him.
Practical Application: Let the Shepherd Name You
Audit your labels. Take time this week to write down the names or identities you’ve been living under, titles, roles, diagnoses, tribes, achievements. Ask: Who gave me this name? And does it match who Christ says I am?
Fast from the mirror. Spend a day without self-inspection, no selfies, no profile-checking, no personality quizzes. Replace the urge for visibility with moments of silent presence before God. Let Him speak your real name into that space.
Seek soul friendships. Find one person this week you can risk being truly known by. Not liked. Known. Choose presence over performance. Choose truth over perception. Choose confession over curation.
Read John 10 aloud. Slowly, prayerfully, speak it over yourself. Wherever Jesus says “sheep,” put your name there. Let His voice re-form the voice that has echoed too long from culture, trauma, or self.
A Prayer to Be Known
Jesus,
Shepherd of my soul, I am tired of performing. I am weary of caricatures, those drawn by others, and the ones I’ve crafted myself.
You say You know me. Not my brand. Not my shadow. Me. Speak again, Lord. Speak my name as You’ve always meant it.
Pull me from the crowd of masks and misnaming. Rescue me from the hirelings, the categories, the applause. Let me feel again the safety of being known, fully, fiercely, and freely.
Let Your voice be louder than theirs. Let Your knowing shape my becoming. And when I forget, remind me: The only name that holds eternal weight is the one You whisper in love.
In Your Holy Name Messiah King Jesus,
Amen.
References
1. Simon Grennan, “Defining Caricature: A Rhetorical and Visual Study,” Journal of Illustration 6, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 7–27.
2. Carl G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 9i (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).
3. Pauline Rosenau, Postmodernism and the Social Sciences (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
4. Hannah Orben and Robin Dunbar, “Social Media and Relationship Maintenance: Do Digital Interactions Predict Closeness?” Psychology Bulletin 143, no. 7 (2017): 747–83.
5. Elizabeth Dunlosky and Katherine Rawson, “The Illusion of Knowing in Metacognitive Monitoring,” Memory and Cognition 34, no. 6 (2006): 1300–1309.
6. Isaac Boaheng, “Exegetical and Theological Reflections on John 10:1–18,” E-Journal of Religious and Theological Studies 7, no. 6 (2021): 65–72.
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