A Three-Inch-Tall Jesus?

When I was about twelve years old, the Sears, Roebuck store in Sweetwater featured a real-live Santa Claus who was just three inches tall.

His tiny house sat on a table. Through the picture window, you could see the little man Sears called Kute Kris Kringle.  He sat by the fireplace in his easy chair in his living room with greenery, ornaments, and packages under the tree.

This Tom Thumb-sized Santa would get up and walk around the room, look out, and wave at us.

Most exciting: He had a tiny telephone on a table by his chair, connected with a full-sized phone on the table near his house.  You could pick up the receiver and tell him what to bring you.

Parents would get their kiddos to wave at the Jolly Old Elf.  If the little folks were brave, they could pick up the phone and tell him their hearts’ desires.

Because I had parted company with Old Saint Nick a few years earlier, I tried to figure how Sears, Roebuck managed to 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.

I guessed they used the principle of looking through the “wrong end” of a telescope.

One day, I picked up the phone 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 that I find something else to occupy my attention and leave the phone line open for younger boys and girls.

As I think back to Sears shrinking Santa Claus to a manageable size, it occurs to me that we do the same thing with Jesus.  A three-inch tall Savior is much more convenient than the full-sized One on the pages of the New Testament.

The creche on a table in our family room is a bit larger than the Sears house where Santa lived, but the Babe in the table-top cradle may be just about three inches long.  Tree ornaments with cattle stall and figures in it sometimes are reduced to no more than three inches.  So we find ways to keep the whole scene small enough not to worry us.  Then, too, when the season is over, we can pack them all up and get them out of our way without great inconvenience. 

We see other ways --more serious ways -- of keeping Jesus small, beyond confining Him to the creche at Christmas.

Some people shrink Jesus by saying He was a great teacher.  Nothing more. 

Others bring Jesus down to size by denying He performed miracles. When He appeared to be walking on the water, they say, the disciples’ boat was at the shore, so Jesus simply took a few steps over to the vessel.  Or when he supposedly fed 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  —  turning it into an outdoor covered-dish luncheon.

With miraculous cures, the Jesus shrinkers say He was a great psychologist who used the power of suggestion to help people recover from psychosomatic ailments.

When it comes to the New Testament’s greatest miracle of all, the resurrection of Jesus, some modern interpreters say his followers wanted so badly for Him to come back, they believed He actually was raised from the dead.  But it makes little sense to suggest daydreams or wishful thinking could have 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 millions across the centuries whose lives have been transformed morally and spiritually through a fairy tale?  The course of Christianity history cannot be so handily dismissed.     

Some simply dismiss the entire Bible out of hand or rewrite it to suit themselves.  President Thomas Jefferson published his own version of the Gospels: basically Jesus’ teachings but none of the miracles.  The Jefferson Bible ends with Jesus being buried.

As we consider these and other ways people try to shrink Jesus to fit their own specifications, we acknowledge the miracles 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, but 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 Christians who believe 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 that can be evaluated under the microscope or in laboratory or field experiments. Thus, Christian claims regarding the person of Jesus and the wonders ascribed for Him in the New Testament cannot be examined scientifically.  But this does not mean they did not happen.

We are blessed by countless wonders of science.  In our technological era, we rely on science every day, at every turn, for our health, jobs, 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.

Someone offered this distinction: Science explains HOW it all happened, and religion explains 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 often spoke kindly to people of faith.

I have fewer problems with avowed atheists or agnostics than with professing Christians who seek to whittle Jesus down to size. I have heard internationally famous Bible professors state categorically that certain incidents in the Bible simply did not happen, could not have happened.  They offer no evidence to support these assertions.

Several years ago, a group of scholars formed “the Jesus Seminar,” with the self-assigned task of analyzing all the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Four Gospels to determine which are authentic and which are not.  By their self-declared authority, they grouped the sayings as authentic, questionable, or definitely not from Jesus.  They declared the Fourth Gospel contains no bona fide sayings of Jesus.   This approach doesn’t even leave Jesus three inches tall.

To my thinking, the most significant whittling down of Jesus is described in what we might call Paul's Christmas Story in chapter 2 of Philippians.  He describes Jesus as being in the form of God but leaving that behind for our sakes.  Rather, Jesus did His own whittling as He “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant and 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: 

He left His Father’s throne above
So free, so infinite His grace—
Emptied Himself of all but love,
And bled for Adam’s helpless race.^*

But the Jesus in the Bible Story did not remain in the grave and did not remain in the whittled-down form.  Instead, God the Father restored Him to His full stature:  “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11).

No three-inch Jesus here!

^* Charles Wesley, “And Can It Be,” The Baptist Hymnal.  Nashville, Tenn.: Convention Press, 1991, p. 147.