to look down on: to judge that someone or something counts for little, and to act on that judgment
The word is built from "down" and a verb for setting your mind on something, so at root it means to set your mind down on a thing, to think it beneath you. From the start it named more than a private feeling. In everyday letters that survive from the ancient world, widows and orphans use it to complain that someone "despised" their weakness, meaning took advantage of them. The oldest and best summary still holds: the contempt felt in the mind shows itself in injurious action.
In the New Testament the word swings between two poles. Most often it means active contempt: to look down on someone and push them aside, as with the humble in Matthew 18:10, the poor shamed at the Lord's Supper in 1 Corinthians 11:22, or a younger leader waved off for his age in 1 Timothy 4:12. In the saying about two masters it slides toward preference, treating one master as counting for nothing beside the other, a command close to one Paul gives elsewhere with a near-synonym (περιφρονέω). And once, at its most striking, it turns noble: at Hebrews 12:2 Jesus "despises the shame" of the cross, refusing to let the world's disgrace define his worth.
What holds these uses together is an evaluative judgment, "this counts for little," that shows up in what a person does. Whether it is a rich guest eating first while the poor go hungry, a servant working carelessly, or Jesus refusing to be moved by the cross's shame, the word names what it looks like when someone decides that another person, or a whole way of keeping score, simply does not count.
Nuances
Whether Paul charges his imagined objector with actively dishonoring God's kindness, forbearance, and patience, or more mildly with presuming upon and undervaluing them.
- contestedActive contempt: to treat God's kindness as if it were divine indifference is to dishonor the benefactor, a failure the ancient world understood as contempt for one's patron.; Cranfield, Romans (ICC), on 2:4; Dunn, Romans 1-8 (WBC 38A), on 2:4; Jewett, Romans (Hermeneia), on 2:4
- contestedPresumption: to make light of and presume upon God's kindness, a softer sense supported by the paired charge of not recognizing its purpose, since one can hardly both actively scorn a thing and be ignorant of it.; Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (NICNT), on 2:4; Schreiner, Romans (BECNT), on 2:4
What Christ's despising of the cross's shame names: refusal to let public disgrace define his worth, calm detachment from it, fearlessness before it, or willing acceptance of it.
- majorityRefusal to be defined by disgrace: Jesus counted the cross's shame as worthless next to the honor of God's approval, an honor-and-shame reading that has become dominant and is tied to the letter's call to bear reproach outside the camp.; deSilva, Despising Shame: Honor Discourse and Community Maintenance in the Epistle to the Hebrews (SBLDS 152); deSilva, "Despising Shame," JBL 113 (1994): 439-461; Koester, Hebrews (Anchor Yale Bible 36), on 12:2
- minorityStoic-like disregard: he thought nothing of the shame, treating it as a matter of indifference, on the model of the sage and the Maccabean martyrs.; Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Hermeneia), 358
- minorityUndaunted courage: he was unafraid of and undaunted by the shame.; Lane, Hebrews 9-13 (WBC 47B), 414
- minorityWilling acceptance: renouncing the heavenly joy that was his by right, he accepted the disgrace of the cross instead.; Ellingworth, The Epistle to the Hebrews (NIGTC), on 12:2