31st Sunday 2022
Wisdom 11:22-12:2; 2Thess 1:11-2:2; Luke 19:1-10
Do you like tax collectors? No, neither do I. In fact, at present I am scrutinising my bank statements to ensure that I will be able to keep the tax man happy come 31st January. No one, I suspect likes paying taxes, yet we know that, without them, we would have no health service, no schools, no public services at all.
Consequently, we see HMRC (formerly the Inland Revenue) as a necessary evil. For the Jewish people of Jesus’ day, however, there was a more serious issue: tax collectors were seen, not merely as a burden, but as a set of traitors. They were collecting taxes on behalf of the occupying power: to use a term popular in the Second World War, they were collaborators.
Some were also extortionists. The publicani, as they were known (why, I wonder, has the word “publican” come to mean a licensed victualler rather than a tax collector? Someone will know.) were assigned a certain amount which must be handed over to the Roman authorities. What they chose to collect beyond that, as their own salary, was up to them, and it was assumed, rightly or wrongly, that many of them demanded more than was reasonable.
It was, however, their association with the hated Roman state which put them beyond the pale. It reminds me of a true story which I was told about a Catholic postman in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. The unionists wouldn’t speak to him because he had “stolen a Protestant job”: the nationalists disowned him because he wore the Crown on his uniform.
For the Jews of Palestine there was a further issue. The coins in which the taxes were paid bore the head of the Emperor, who was designated “divus”, or divine. So the publicani were regarded as religious and not simply national traitors, and so were classed with the prostitutes as public sinners.
Yet this particular tax collector Zacchaeus was to undergo a conversion. Something must have been stirring in him already to move him to make a public exhibition of himself. He was, we are told, a senior tax collector, a high ranking public official, yet he was prepared to make a spectacle of himself by shinning up a tree, acceptable behaviour perhaps for hoi polloi, but not for someone of his status.
Then Jesus looks at him, and speaks to him, and his conversion is complete. To allow Jesus to look at us, and speak to us, calling us by name, is to open us to conversion. Like Zacchaeus, we need to put ourselves in a position to be looked at, to be called by name. We need to put aside, for a time, the daily routine; to make a space and a time to be alone, to clear our minds of the turmoil of every day, and to wait in stillness and silence.
Jesus will come to us, will look at us, will call us by name. We won’t hear a voice, but if we are patient, we will feel the stirring of His call to us; we will know the areas in which we need to change, to be converted. And, as Jesus went to Zacchaeus’ house to spend time with him, so He will spend time with us, provided we are not too busy, too distracted, too caught up in the affairs of the world.
Many tax collectors became followers of Jesus. Did they abandon their jobs in order to do so? We know that Levi Matthew did; perhaps others also decided that a more radical following of Jesus was required, and left their employment, which may help to explain the false accusation at Jesus’ trial that He opposed the payment of taxes to Caesar.
There is no indication that Zacchaeus intended to do the same, or that Jesus demanded it. Perhaps Our Lord saw the accusations of treason and religious disloyalty as expressions of nationalism rather than of true piety. It was a change of heart that He demanded, rather than a change of employer. What change of heart does He demand of you and me?
