[This is another of several stories I intend to post from now through Christmas or perhaps New Year's. This one first appeared in my Once for a Shining Hour, available in paperback and Kindle from Amazon.com.]
When I was about twelve years old, the Sears, Roebuck store in Sweetwater had a Christmas shopping display which featured a real-live Santa Claus who was just three inches tall.
At times, this Tom Thumb-sized Santa would get up and walk around the room. He would look out and wave at those who watched him.
The most exciting thing about this was the tiny telephone on a table by his chair. It was connected with a full-sized phone on the table near the tiny gift bringer’s house where customers watched him. If you wanted to talk with him, you could pick up the receiver and tell him what to bring you.
Parents would lead their kiddos to the display, point to the picture window, and get them to wave. If the little folks were brave, they could pick up the phone and tell the Jolly Little Elf their hearts’ desires.
Because I had parted company with Old Saint Nick a few years earlier, I stood and watched, trying to figure how Sears, Roebuck managed to set up the display and get the real-live man to look so small.
Television was still a dream in West Texas in the mid-1940s, so I doubted that Sears had a television studio set up in some remote corner of the store.
After a while, I noticed a walled-off section immediately behind Kris Kingle’s Little House on the Table and wondered why I hadn’t seen it sooner. So I figured the full-grown man was just on the other side of that wall on a full-sized movie set which looked like a living room. My guess was that the illusion was made possible by using the principle of looking through the “wrong end” of a telescope.
With the boldness of late preadolescence, I picked up the phone one day to talk to Santa. That was OK with him . . . the first time. When I left the area and came back and called him several more times, the big man behind the three-inch illusion strongly suggested into his mouthpiece that I find something else to occupy my attention. I should leave the phone line open for younger boys and girls.
As I think back to how the Sears people had managed to shrink Santa Claus to a manageable size, it occurs to me that we try to do the same thing with Jesus. A three-inch tall Savior is much more convenient than the full-grown One who comes to life on the pages of the New Testament.
The Babe in Bethlehem with shepherds and angels and Three Kings are a beautiful scene on our Christmas cards. If we have a creche on a table top in our family room, the stable is a bit larger than the Sears house where Santa lived, and the adult figures are considerably taller than three inches. But the Babe in the table-top manger may be just about three inches long. For added convenience, there are tree ornament versions of the manger scene, with the cattle stall and the figures in it, all reduced to no more than three inches. So there are various ways to keep the whole scene small enough not to be much bother. Then, too, when the season is over, we can pack them all up and get them out of our way without great inconvenience.
There are other ways -- more serious ways -- of keeping Jesus small beyond confining Him to the creche at Christmas.
Some people shrink Jesus to manageable size by saying He was a great teacher whose words are recorded in the Four Gospels. Nothing more. His homespun stories teach lessons everyone can benefit from. Some say, “The Sermon on the Mount is my guide for life,” and that is the extent of their understanding about Jesus.
For those who claim to follow the Sermon on the Mount, one must wonder how they deal with these instructions: when someone strikes you on one side of the face, turn the other cheek; when someone tries to take away your coat, give him your overcoat as well; when you are compelled to walk a mile with someone, walk a second mile willingly.
Another way to bring Jesus down to size is to deny that He performed miracles. For example, when He appeared to be walking on the water, the disciples’ boat was actually at the shore, and there was nothing mysterious about Jesus taking a few steps over to the vessel. Or when we are told of feeding a crowd of several thousand people with a few pieces of bread and fish, here’s what they say really happened: He shamed the crowd into admitting they had brought food with them for the day’s outing, so they took out their hidden food and shared with one another -- sort of an outdoor covered-dish luncheon.
In the case of miraculous cures, the Jesus shrinkers say He was a great psychologist who used strong power of suggestion to help people recover from psychosomatic ailments, nothing more.
When it comes to the New Testament’s greatest miracle of all, the resurrection of Jesus, some modern interpreters say those original followers wanted so badly for Him to come back to them that they believed He actually was raised from the dead. But it makes little sense to suggest mere daydreams or wishful thinking could have given the original impetus which caused the small, insignificant movement to catch fire and grow, even in the face of persecution, imprisonment, and death. Likewise, if the resurrection was a delusion, how do we explain the millions of people across the centuries whose lives have been transformed through faith in a fairy tale? The course of Christianity history cannot be so handily dismissed.
Some people simply dismiss the entire Bible out of hand or rewrite it to suit themselves. President Thomas Jefferson published his own version of the Bible which basically contained Jesus’ teaching but none of the miracles. The Jefferson Bible ends with the corpse being buried.
As we consider these and other ways people try to shrink Jesus to fit their own specifications, we acknowledge the stories in the Bible are not based on scientific evidence. It takes the eye of faith to see Jesus as more than a great teacher, more than a healer of diseases of the mind, as the One who rose from the dead and brings everlasting life.
Faith and science need not be seen as mortal enemies. Many scientists are devout followers of Christ who believe, for example, that God used the evolutionary process to bring about life on earth, over millions of years, beginning with the simplest one-celled animals and developing all the way to human beings. These scientists do not believe Jesus must be shrunk in size in order for us to see the validity of the scientific process.
Science is based on measurable evidence which can be evaluated under the microscope or in laboratory or field experiments. Christian claims regarding the person of Jesus and the wonders ascribed for Him in the New Testament belong to a past age and cannot be replicated. But this does not mean they did not happen.
The world has been blessed by countless wonders of science. In our technological era, we rely on science every day, at every turn, for our health, transportation, communication, and entertainment. So followers of Jesus can ill afford to dismiss science. Neither should scientists attempt to dismiss the realm of faith which lies beyond scientific proof.
Regarding the world and how it got here, Christians should respect science as it explains HOW it all happened, and scientists should respect those in the faith community who explain WHO made it happen. They need not be at war.
Albert Einstein, often considered one of the most brilliant persons who ever lived, said he did not believe in a personal God and referred to himself as agnostic, but he was not openly antagonistic toward religious faith.
Currently, famous atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are evangelistic against religious faith as they seek to reduce Jesus to absolute zero. But I have fewer problems with avowed atheists or agnostics than professing Christians, who seek to whittle Jesus down to size in ways suggested earlier in this essay. I have heard internationally famous Bible professors state categorically that certain incidents reported in the Bible simply did not happen, could not have happened. They offer no evidence to support their assertions. They simply deny these things as being possible.
Also, several years ago, a group of scholars formed what is known as the Jesus Seminar. Their self-assigned task was to analyze all the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Four Gospels to determine which sayings are authentic and which are not. By their own authority, they grouped the sayings according to whether they are authentic, questionable, or definitely not from Jesus. They declared, for example, that John, the Fourth Gospel, contains no authentic words from Jesus. By their reckoning, the entire book was composed by the church in a later generation, with no sayings which can be traced back to Jesus. This approach doesn’t even leave Jesus three inches tall.
To my thinking, the most significant bona fide whittling down of Jesus is described in the Christmas Story as told by St. Paul in the second chapter of Philippians. He describes Jesus as being in the form of God but not clinging to that closeness to God the Father. Rather, Jesus did His own whittling as He “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8).
Charles Wesley, one of Methodism’s founding brothers, in his song, “And Can It Be,” described Jesus’s willingness to lay aside His heavenly perks:
So free, so infinite His grace—
Emptied Himself of all but love,
And bled for Adam’s helpless race.*
No three-inch Jesus here!
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