Tax Collectors and Sinners, I

Matthew 9:10-13 And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” (NRSV)

WW, commenting on “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” remarked that she liked to reflect on the Gospels, and on how Jesus welcomed all to his table, even tax-collectors and sinners. A similar observation was made by jh, who remarked that “from the beginning the attraction of christianity was the openness to people as they were.” Amen to that, sister and brother.

I'd like to chew on this passage (and implicitly on related passages), in a sequence of postings.

Today we consider the question, “Who were the tax collectors, and why did they chose to do a job that alienated them from their community?”

The usual starting point for answering this question is the notion of tax farming, in which an individual or group pre-paid the taxes for a certain area, thereby gaining the right to extract and retain taxes from it. This was an intrinsically speculative business: the opportunity for profit came from the possibility that they might extract more than they paid. To make money, you had to squeeze, hard. The assumption is that the tax collectors are the tax farmers, and that their motivation was simple profit—indeed, the Wikipedia article on tax farming that I linked to above identifies St. Matthew as a tax farmer. In this post, I will challenge that assumption.

Let me make my own assumption here. The Romans weren't interested in penny-ante tax farmers. They wanted money, they wanted it now, and they wanted it with as little trouble as possible. Yes, they could always fall back on the legions, but legions were expensive, and they inevitably injured the productive capacity of the regions in which they imposed their will. Common sense indicated that they wanted to work with a few people, each of whom had a lot of money, and had it available up front. In short, they wanted it from the rich. So who was both rich, and empowered by their collaboration with Rome? The Sadducees. Indeed, what we know of their theology—that there is no resurrection, and therefore no punishment or reward for how we live our lives—seems particularly well adapted for people whose livelihood depends on selling out their people.

How does the rich man in Jerusalem recoup the taxes he paid for northern Galilee? He doesn't go door to door, himself. And he certainly doesn't advertise that he's the guy who stands to profit. No, he hires overseers, and they hire the actual tax collectors. And for the tax collectors to be effective, they have to know the community from which they will collect taxes. So who lives in a community, and is willing to be engage in judicial robbery of their friends and neighbors? It must be someone who is truly desperate. Someone who has debts. Someone whose children are starving. Someone who is facing slavery. In short, someone who has only bad choices, someone who was already victimized by society.

And so we shoot the messenger, blame the victim, and call the tax collector a sinner, because any of these are easier than to recognize the ways in which our society is broken, our obligation to fix it, and to pay the price that we must pay to do so.

Jesus, blessed Jesus, took the hard way, the narrow way. The way that lead to Jerusalem, and from Jerusalem to Calvary. The way that leads us on.

Peace