Entrusted of the Lord, a devotional thought

There's a spot in the Gospel of John, chapter 2, that I've always wondered about. In 2:24-25, we’re told that Jesus was in Jerusalem performing “miraculous signs” and many were believing because of what they’d seen. And then it says, “but Jesus did not ‘entrust’ himself to them, because he knew all people.” That's the part that keeps me wondering, in particular, because it’s not exactly clear what it means when it says that Jesus did not “entrust himself” to these people. The Greek verb it uses is pisteuo, which means “to believe.” It is, incidentally, the same verb in 23, when it says many "believed in him" because of his miraculous signs. They pisteuo-ed in him, but he did not, in turn pisteuo himself to them.

As strange as it may sound to say it like this, it seems there is a necessary “entrusting of himself to us” that Jesus does when we come into relationship with him, a reciprocal “faith” (for lack of a better word) that Jesus places in us, trusting us as his followers, and entrusting us with his own self-revelation and life. 

The immediate reason the text gives, for why Jesus did not do this for the people in this passage, is that their faith in him was superficial and self-interested. They believed simply because they'd seen the miraculous signs he’d performed and ostensibly were looking for more (v.23); and Jesus was intimately aware of their self-centred motives, inasmuch as he "knew all people" (v.24).  

To extrapolate a spiritual truth from the text, we might say that when our faith in him is like this—superficial and self-interested—Jesus does not reciprocate and entrust to us the deep things of God, the deep intimacy he wants to have with us. He certainly did not do so for the people in this passage. They trusted in him only superficially, so He did not entrust himself deeply to them.

Surely there is a caution here, and a challenge. We are being urged here, I think, to nurture that kind of faith in the Lord Jesus that is not based on the next flashy miracle and what’s in it for me, but is based instead on deeply knowing Jesus as he is, and receiving him for who he is. I’m reading between the lines, of course, but this kind of faith, it seems, is the kind that our Lord honours reciprocally by entrusting himself to us, in turn.