Hilton Head Island, SC – February 28, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 9:9-13; Luke 19:1-10
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “For the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost.” – Luke 19:10 (RSV)
At this time of year, many Americans are busily preparing for April 15. That is a significant and dreaded date for everyone who pays taxes. It is the day of reckoning for those who under-estimated what they needed to pay, and a day of rejoicing for those who over-estimated the amount, and who will therefore get a refund. But one way or the other, the Internal Revenue Service is definitely the least popular governmental agency in existence, especially from January to April. It is natural for all of us to think they always seem to take more from us than we believe is due them. As the years go on, “government” seems to become less and less popular as well.
Hardly anyone likes to pay taxes, even though we may approve of the necessity. That is especially true in situations where nations are under occupation by other nations. We think it is bad enough when one’s own government imposes taxes on us, but if a foreign government were to do it, we would be doubly unhappy.
The people of Judea had been under Roman occupation for nearly ninety years when Jesus began his ministry. Any people who had enemy troops stationed among them for that long a time would inevitably have bitter feelings toward the occupying soldiers and the Roman officials who administered the occupation. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Jews had to pay taxes to the Romans in order to pay the costs of occupying Judea. Talk about adding insult to injury: they didn’t want the Romans there in the first place, and they certainly didn’t want to have to pay the wages of keeping armed men throughout their country, ready to extinguish any resistance to the Roman occupation which might ignite at any moment.
Throughout history, the strongest nations have often established colonies on foreign soil to display and to expand their strength. The Greeks did it, the Romans did it, as did the Spanish, Dutch, French, Germans, British, and Turks. We Americans did it too, in places like Panama, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Afghanistan, and Iraq. However, we did not call them colonies; that term would offend our delicate national sensibilities. We became the rulers of these nations because of wars we waged and won, don’t you see. At certain periods in those countries, though, we were essentially an occupying force.
The Stamp Act of 1765, a tax, led to the Boston Massacre of 1772, which led to the Boston Tea Party of 1774 (another tax), which led to the shot heard round the world in Lexington, which led to the shots heard round the world in Concord, which led to the world’s first written Declaration of Independence from a colonial power in 1776, which led to Yorktown in 1781. People don’t like tax collectors, because they don’t like taxes, because too many of them don’t like government.
The Romans could not risk having Romans as their tax collectors in Judea. Roman revenue gatherers might be killed by unruly Jews. So they hired local Jews who were paid to perform that odious function. All of these people would have been considered lackeys of the Romans. Furthermore, their reputation was that they took too much money, skimming off the top from their fellow countrymen. Therefore they were always very unpopular with the residents of Judea.
For this reason, it is astounding that Jesus would choose a tax collector as one of his disciples. Matthew is specifically identified as a tax collector and as one of Jesus’ disciples in the three synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but he is not mentioned at all in the Gospel of John, nor, for that matter, does John even provide a list of disciples as the synopticists did (although all three didn’t agree precisely on who the twelve were). A common complaint of the scribes and Pharisees against Jesus is that he openly ate “with tax collectors and sinners.” Each of the Synoptics specifically says that. Because they didn’t like the religious ideas of Jesus, they latched onto the widespread political disgust over tax collectors further to denigrate Jesus.
Jesus’ religious adversaries took great umbrage at the company Jesus kept. If he were truly a holy man, they reasoned, he would know better than to associate with such riff raff as Jewish fifth columnists who made their living by extracting taxes from Jews in their own land.
Tradition says that the Gospel of Matthew was written by the tax-collector-disciple named Matthew. Most scholars doubt the disciple wrote the Gospel that bears his name, saying that someone else wrote it fifty years or so after Jesus’ death and resurrection.
Whatever may be the historical facts regarding authorship, the Gospel of Matthew describes the call of the tax collector by Jesus in one short statement, and it never refers to the episode again. “As Jesus passed along from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he rose and followed him” (Mt. 9:9).
There are two kinds of reactions from two kinds of Christians who read a verse like that. The first reaction is from those who readily believe that Jesus was so charismatic he could say something like that to people such as themselves and they would instantly leave everything and follow Jesus, presumably as the original disciples did. The other kind of Christians would skeptically say to themselves, “No, there has to be more to this story than just that. Nobody would leave home and hearth if a stranger walked up and made such a preposterous challenge to anyone.” You can decide for yourself which kind of Christian you are.
Whatever may have been the actual circumstances by which Jesus recruited twelve disciples, everyone would have to admit they were a mawkishly motley crew. There was no unanimity of background among them, except for the first four disciples, who were two sets of brothers who were fishermen on the Lake of the Galilee. They were Peter and Andrew, about whose father nothing is said in any Gospel, and James and John, who are both identified as “sons of Zebedee,” whoever Zebedee was. Nothing is said about the backgrounds of most of the rest, except that there was a disciple, and possibly two, who were political “zealots,” as they were known.
Because of the Roman occupation, there were always hotheads among the Jews who wanted to try to drive the Romans out. They were like the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers of their day. I will refer to the two disciples who may have been in that category two weeks from today.
The point is this: Jesus seemed very consciously to gather a wide and peculiar circle of followers, many of whom would have had highly dubious reputations. This process was not accidental; it was obviously intentional. And that’s what all these Company He Kept sermons are about. Why in the world would he do that?
Incidentally, you may be wondering why I would choose to write such a series of sermons as these. They are not like most of my sermons, which are not nearly as “Bible-based” in practically every sentence and paragraph. So I’ll tell you why I am doing it in these six sermons. It is to try to help you understand historically why Jesus ended up crucified on a Roman cross. The apostle Paul explained the crucifixion in a vastly different way than these sermons attempt to explain it. The same is true for traditional Christian Christology. In the old familiar phrase, Paul and the most prevalent tradition say that Jesus died “to save us from our sins.” That is true, too, depending on what specifically is meant by that statement, but I won’t be going into that at all in these sermons. My purpose here is to try to help you grasp the remarkable risk Jesus deliberately took in hanging out with the type of people he did hang out with. Or, if you prefer, the type of people with whom he hung out.
So let us return to today’s subject: tax collectors. Jesus “received” tax collectors and sinners, the record says, and he “ate with them.” In that culture, if anybody ate a meal with anybody, it meant they were what Spaniards would call simpatico. That word means that they were sympathetic; they got along together. If you were trying to start a new religious movement, would you purposefully choose the mentally ill, highly unpopular public officials like tax collectors, practitioners of the world’s oldest profession, political insurrectionists, or a generally low-class bunch of followers? Well, that’s what Jesus did, and he must have had a reason for doing it. That’s what we are trying to figure out.
So let’s come back to a particular tax collector, Zacchaeus by name. The story of Zacchaeus occurs only in Luke, and he appears in his Gospel narrative just two or three weeks before Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered Jerusalem with his “madding crowd” of followers, riding on a donkey, of all strange beasts. At the beginning and at the end of his ministry, Jesus visibly had close dealings with tax collectors.
We are told that Zacchaeus was a runt of a man, and because there were so many people in the crowd following him, Zacchaeus couldn’t see Jesus. Apparently he didn’t want to talk to him. All he wanted to do was to see him. Therefore he climbed up into a sycamore tree --- not a palm tree, of which there are many in Jericho, or a cypress, and ditto, but a sycamore tree.
Back in the days when I used to organize groups to go to Israel, I always used an American Jew named Walter Zanger as our guide. I have noted before that Walter grew up in Brooklyn, became a rabbi, and emigrated to Israel the year before the Six-Day War. Whenever our bus came to Jericho, Walter would point out a very old, tall sycamore tree. Palestinian sycamores are not like the sycamores along the banks of the Wabash, far away, or like those along Seabrook Drive in Hilton Head Plantation, or along Unter den Linden Strasse in East Berlin. The Jericho sycamore is an evergreen, but not like a pine, and more like a cedar. Walter always told the groups that it could have been the tree Zacchaeus climbed, because it is very old, he said. I never believed for a skinny minute that tree was two thousand years old. Some trees are, including giant sequoias and tiny bristlecone pines in the American West. However, a good guide has to keep his charges interested in what he says, and Walter was an excellent guide, bless his now-departed soul. Whenever I think of this Gospel story, I think of that sycamore tree in Jericho, and Walter, and wonderful waves of nostalgia sweep over me.
Anyway, Luke says that Jesus encountered Zacchaeus when he was passing through Jericho on his way to Jerusalem from his home territory in the north, the area then and now known as “the Galilee.” Luke tells us that Zacchaeus was “a tax collector, and rich.” If he was rich, it was probably because for years he had been extracting too many taxes from his neighbors, carefully siphoning off more than the cut the Romans demanded from him. In fact, when we hear the whole story, Zacchaeus as much as admits this. He tells Jesus, after he invites Jesus and his disciples to come to his home for a meal and he has a profound conversion experience, he says, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will restore it to him fourfold.” What I think this means is as follows: “I have swiped lots of money from lots of folks, and so I will pay back four times what I stole from them.”
In each of these sermons I will ask why Jesus did what he did, so I’ll ask it again now: How did he know Zacchaeus’s name, and why did he say to him, “Zacchaeus, make haste and come down; I must stay at your home today”? Luke doesn’t bother to tell us anything about any of that. Nonetheless, Jesus beckoned to Zacchaeus up in his tree for a very particular reason. After Zacchaeus’s life-changing turnaround in a short visit with the Nazarene rabbi, the Nazarene rabbi said of Zacchaeus, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost” (Lk. 19:9-10).
Salvation was first for the Jews, said Paul, but also for the Gentiles. All Jews agreed with the first part, but not with the second part. I am convinced that Jesus saw himself as the Announcer of Salvation via the kingdom of God, not the Bringer of Salvation via God’s kingdom. But of that, more next week.
Why did Jesus openly associate with tax collectors? He did it because he knew they were lost. Everybody hated them, but he didn’t. Everybody shunned them, but he didn’t. Jesus never hated or shunned anyone. On occasion he gave certain people holy ned, as he did to the scribes and Pharisees, or at least that’s what the Gospels say. But he never despised or rejected anybody, even though he himself ended up despised and rejected, a la Isaiah 53 and a la Calvary.
IRS employees are anonymous bureaucrats. First-century Jewish tax collectors were familiar uncles, cousins, and brothers who were employed by the Romans. Therefore they were detested by their fellow Jews; they were despised; they were loathed; they were hated. But not by Jesus. Jesus loved them; this I know. All you need is love; love is all you need. Jesus knew that. So he even loved tax collectors. It was extraordinary, and also revolting to nearly everyone.
E.P. Sanders is a well-known contemporary scholar of Judaism and Christianity during the Greco-Roman period of history. In his book The Historical Figure of Jesus, he wrote this about tax collectors: “(N)o one would have objected if Jesus persuaded tax collectors to leave the ranks of the wicked: everybody else would have benefited. If he were a successful reformer of dishonest tax collectors, Jesus would not have drawn criticism” (p. 236). Then Sanders noted, as is said in the Gospels on more than one occasion, Jesus told tax collectors that God loved them and that they would enter the kingdom of God before many of the so-called righteous people. In saying that, Jesus implied that neither the tax collectors nor anyone else had to repent of their sins. That’s what got Jesus into trouble. From the standpoint of commonly accepted religious propriety, Jesus’ theology was improper, and those were the kind of statements which got him nailed to a cross.
Be certain of this, Christian people: the kinds of people whom Jesus carefully selected as his inner core of followers were, for the most part, the kind of people to whom the religious titans of the time were viscerally and fiercely opposed. Social outcasts should remain social pariahs, they thought. A populist preacher would not be allowed to change public opinion on that score. They were not about to let Jesus to get away with that.