If a Bible reader had to nominate some group in Scripture for “Most Hated,” I doubt many would name anyone other than the tax collectors. In fact, tax collectors are singled out for scorn directly or indirectly over 30 times in the synoptic gospels. Jewish hatred for tax collectors is beyond the pale; it is palpable. They despise these men, and they do not respond well when Jesus embraces them as followers and even makes one, repentant or no, His close disciple.
The Question
So a natural question would be: “Why do the Jews feel such a profound hatred for tax collectors in the gospel era?”
The answer to this goes well beyond the normal distaste and anxiety that attends tax collectors in modern democratic societies. In democratic societies where government is supposed to be of the people, by the people and for the people, the tax collector plays an important, but annoying, role in sustaining a system of ultimate benefit for the citizenry. The tax collector in the gospels, however, does not, in the Jewish mind, play such a role.
The answer is a history lesson. So, bear with me if you will, while I tell you a story. The tax collectors don’t come into this story until the very end, but when they do, perhaps you will hate them just as much as those around Jesus did. They would certainly deserve it.
The Story Answer
Just as the Jewish self-consciousness today is intimately bound up with the holocaust, the Jewish self-consciousness of Jesus’ day is intimately bound up with the lost glory days of the Davidic kings and the centuries of struggle under foreign rule following their exile.
David, himself, establishes as free of a society as one might hope for in the ancient world. It is like a proto-constitutional republic. The people covenant with the house of David to be kings. The sons of David are sworn to rule by Torah and by principles of shepherd leadership, as spiritual equals with the people before Yahweh in whose image every member of society is made. Given the corruptive nature of power, it doesn’t always work out so well, but before exile, they are always ruled by brothers and not foreigners, and are fed spiritually through the prophets on the promises of a reestablished Messianic rule by David’s future son who will restore all things to proper working order, forever.
After exile, during the days of Zerubbabel, Ezra and Nehemiah the Jewish people are permitted to return to their homeland, but they remain under foreign control. The Babylonians fall to the Persians and the Persians fall to the Greeks, and after the death of Alexander the Great, the Greek rulers fight amongst themselves for centuries over who will control David’s old territory.
Life is not too terrible when these rulers leave the Jewish people to their own devices in exchange for tribute raised through taxes, but during the days of Antiochus Epiphanies things take an ugly turn. Antiochus hates the Jews and determines to crush them through various means, like seducing Jewish youths to the dark side of Hellenistic life, banning Torah, interfering in Jewish religious practices, and defiling their sacred sites.
This leads to two things.
First, war breaks out when a band of brothers, called the Maccabees, rallies the Jewish people to throw off foreign oppression. When blood is shed, the disaffected Jewish youth return home spiritually with a vengeance.
So, the second thing that happens is that Judaism takes on a deep anti-gentile flavor. They come to believe that their only hope for survival is an isolationism that ultimately betrays their call to be a nation of priests and a light to the Gentiles.
The Maccabees are victorious and win freedom from foreign leaders for the first time since the days before the exile. This is no Davidic reign, but it does seem to the Jews to be an important step in that direction.
The youngest of the brothers Maccabee establishes a temporary kingdom structure, the Hasmoneans, replete with dynastic inheritance and non-levitical high priesthood, with the understanding that all power would, of course, be turned over to Messiah when he should arise.
Not surprising, it gets messy and some 60 years before Jesus’ birth, hard won Jewish freedom is lost when the Roman General Pompeii takes control on behalf of Rome. The changes are slow, but steady. Pompeii begins his rule by working with existing Jewish leadership for a time. Even so, the Jewish people find themselves under foreign rule again, and the level of Roman control and interference grows as the decades pass.
Herod the Great, a pseudo-Jewish Roman representative proves despotic in psychotic ways. Upon his celebrated death, Rome divides power between Herod’s surviving heirs, and, eventually, appoints purely Roman prefects over various parts of old Davidic territory. Dreams of Messiah never seem less likely, and are, for that very reason, most pronounced. If ever the Jewish people needed Yahweh to fulfill His Messianic promises, it is then. The tension between Jewish longing and Roman determination intensifies until around AD 70 when Rome’s so called “patience” with the Jews runs out and they conduct one of the cruelest and most legendary slaughters in human history.
The Taxman Cometh
So what do we have? We have a people nurtured on unprecedented levels of freedom, nursed on great Messianic hopes for a divine peaceable kingdom, raised in the great light of Torah, who descend into the madness of pagan domination for centuries. Hope deferred makes the heart sick, and hope lost breaks the soul. They have been abused, bullied, tormented, tortured, and murdered. They are daily prevented from being the people they believe God has called them to be, and the oppression of it, weighs heavily upon them.
It gets worse. As would happen later in the days of the Nazi Holocaust, many Jewish people, for a variety of reasons, throw in their lot with the oppressor and play the role of betrayer of their own people. The common Jewish person might not be able to say much about their leaders whose power and wealth were largely dependent on continued Roman support of their leadership, but another class of betrayer is ready at hand for their ire—THE TAXMAN.
The Taxman, when Jewish, is the worst of all people. They are often low men enjoying a sense of power over those who despise them. They are liable to Rome for a certain amount of funds, but have a free hand beyond that to exact whatever they wish, with soldiers to back them up. They grow rich. They sniff out hidden wealth. They skulk to find new sources of tax income. They are the greedy, smug, sneering, mocking ubiquitous face of Roman oppression worn by fellow Jews, who, but for their abandonment of faith in the promises of God, would have been brothers in arms.
Good News, Bad News
It is just too much to bear. In the complex experience of this betrayal, frustration boils over. It is important as we read the gospels to feel the depth of it. In a good-news, bad-news scenario, the contrast is essential. It is the bad news that heightens the experience of the good news.
When these turncoats come to Jesus, like prodigal sons fattened upon the stolen wealth of their brothers, Jesus accepts their repentance and rejoices with the angels that no class of sinner is beyond the reach of the Holy Spirit’s conviction or the Father’s forgiveness.
And that is good news for you, Chief of Sinners.
