|
by
Doug Ward |
Luke's Gospel tells the familiar story of Zacchaeus, a tax collector in
first-century Judea who greatly desired to meet Jesus and climbed a tree in
order to get a better look at him.
Some
of us will remember a song about Zacchaeus that is often sung in Sunday School.
It begins, "Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he."
These words are based on Luke 19:3, which says that Zacchaeus "was seeking
to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was
small in stature."
When
we read Luke 19 we tend to assume, as in the song, that it was Zacchaeus who
was "small in stature." But because the pronouns "he" and
"him" are used for both Zacchaeus and Jesus throughout this account,
there is some ambiguity in the text. It could just as well be Jesus who is the
short one.
Biblical
scholar Isaac Soon points out this ambiguity in a 2023 paper. Soon explains
that if Jesus was short, Luke would have had good reason to mention it, since
he seems to compare Jesus to two famous people who were known to be vertically
challenged.
One
of those short people is Aesop, the great teller and collector of fables who
lived around 600 BC. Jesus, who was known for his striking parables, can be
viewed as a new Aesop. It is interesting that the phrase "Oh, how foolish
and slow of heart," that Jesus says on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:25,
also appears in two of Aesop's fables.
The
second short person is the philosopher Socrates, who was sentenced to death for
his teachings and was said to have faced death with composure and nobility.
Some scholars believe that Luke portrays Jesus' death in a manner that makes comparisons
with the death of Socrates.
Soon
also notes that Celsus, a second-century critic of
Christianity, charged that Jesus was "little and ugly and
undistinguished." The source of this comment may have been Isaiah 53:2,
which describes a servant of God who would have "no form or majesty that
we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him."
Christians have always seen Isaiah 53 as a prophecy about Jesus, leading to a
view that there was nothing special about Jesus' physical appearance.
It
is thus possible that Jesus, rather than Zacchaeus, was the short one in Luke
19:3. Whatever the heights of the two men, Luke emphasizes both Zacchaeus'
desire to know and follow Jesus and Jesus' openness to sharing fellowship with
a tax collector. Tax collectors, as agents of the Roman government, were widely
despised in first-century Judea, but Luke shows that even a tax collector could
turn to God and receive salvation. The account of Jesus and Zacchaeus reminds
us that no one should be considered to be beyond redemption.
File
translated from TEX by TTH,
version 3.66.
On 10 Oct 2024, 11:52.
