Have you ever stood before a mirror and wished you had a different face or body? If you haven't, you belong to a very small minority of the human race. Psychologists say that even the most beautiful people in the world often feel ugly and unattractive. Such well-known movie stars as Liv Ullman, Doris Day, and Meryl Streep have publicly expressed misgivings about their appearance.

So you are in good company when you wish your nose were longer or shorter, or your ears didn't stick out, or your chin didn't look like the Spanish Steps in Rome, or you had Omar Sharif's eyes instead of the ones you were born with. You are not alone when you worry that you are too thin or too fat, or that your hair is too sparse or too coarse, or that you need, as Don Knotts once said he did, a body transplant.

It is the millions of persons who feel the same way that have made reducing spas and plastic surgery as common as indoor plumbing. One woman who had made more trips to her surgeon than either he or she would admit was heard to say, "If I have any more face lifts, the skin from my knees will be halfway up my waist!"

Our preoccupation with attractiveness ought to make us extremely receptive to the plight of poor Zacchaeus in our text today. Aside from those with such obvious problems as blindness or lameness, Zacchaeus is the only person in the entire New Testament noted for having a physical handicap. That is truly exceptional.

Zacchaeus must have been very, very short for his size to have drawn attention to him. Israel surely swarmed, as it does now, with short people, people with warts on their noses, people with ears missing, people with deformed bodies, people with no teeth, people in all shapes and conditions. Yet nothing was said about them. Zacchaeus must have been a midget or a dwarf to have received such notice.

Have you ever stopped to imagine what life must have been like for him? People can be thoughtlessly cruel about handicaps, can't they? One of our sons was born with crossed eyes, which were later corrected by surgery. I still remember some of the barbaric remarks made by people in stores and elevators who looked into his innocent little face.

Recent studies conclude that school teachers often respond more favorably to their better-looking students, and that judges are swayed by the appearances of defendants in court, meting out stronger sentences to the least attractive among them.

Zacchaeus must have been the butt of many jokes. He was probably always chosen last for games and laughed at by the prettiest girls. Maybe this is why, when he had the opportunity, he took the position as superintendent of taxes for the Roman government occupying his country. Tax collectors were never popular, and in Israel they had the special problem of being thought spiritually unclean, because they handled money bearing the Emperor's inscription, and therefore were not allowed to observe any of the religious holidays.