Jesus, Government and Taxes
Often when discussions of Jesus and government come up, people will point to Luke 20:25 where Jesus says “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” as evidence that Jesus had an attitude of acceptance toward government and taxes. While it is true that Jesus does not discourage his followers from paying taxes or from submitting to rulers it is inaccurate to conclude that he views government or taxes in a positive light in any sense. What Jesus actually does is far more subversive and illegal not to mention effective, than simply telling people not to pay taxes; Jesus intentionally disrupts the tax system, reversing the flow of money so the overtaxed poor actually receive their money back.
If we want to fully appreciate Jesus’ perspective on taxes we must understand the context he was working in, particularly the Roman system of taxation. The Roman tax system in the first century was brutally excessive. Historian Ramsay McMullen notes that “The Romans wrung ultimately from the provincial peasants all that could be economically extracted.”[i]Not only in Judea, but across the Roman Empire the policy of maximum taxation was systematic. Neil Elliott quotes Nero’s instructions to a newly appointed governor regarding taxes “You know my needs. See to it no one is left with anything!” The system was held in place by violence and terror, and the chief agent of Roman terror was the tax collector. Philo describes how the Romans intentionally appointed as tax collectors the most ruthless men they could find, gave them the means to over tax the people, and the immunity of being government agents[ii]. The result was government sanctioned extortion, enforced by tyrants who were free to take as much as they wanted by any means possible, including kidnapping, torture, execution of family members, even the mutilation of deceased loved ones. This is the tax system that Jesus is said to have endorsed.
Given the vicious nature of Roman tax collectors, it is not surprising that people were so perplexed by Jesus’ willingness to associate with them. These men were not just backsliders or moral failures. They were truly evil people. They were the sort who would hold your grandmother hostage for money, and yet Jesus’ reputation for associating with them is so well known that it practically becomes his title: Jesus, a friend of sinners and tax collectors (Matt 11:19). We will get to the answer to why Jesus spends so much time with these monsters presently, but for now let’s just observe this: If tax collectors were a regular part Jesus’ audience, then it is appropriate to ask how Jesus’ message would be heard by tax collectors, and to what extant did Jesus actually tailor his message for tax collectors[iii].
In order to answer these questions, we first need to understand what it meant for a Jew to become a tax collector. For anyone to become a tax-collector in the Roman Empire of the first century, it meant being unpopular, but for a Jew to become a tax collector it meant being a traitor and a heretic. For first century Jews the Roman occupation of Judea was a problem not just because it meant economic and political servitude, but because it cast serious doubt on the validity of their faith. If the land was given by God, then Roman occupation meant that God was possibly angry with Israel, or perhaps that he had abandoned Israel altogether. The faithful, however, believed that God was simply waiting for the right moment to deliver them. Stories of the Maccibean revolts against the Selucid Empire, including the Chanukah story, as well as the numerous stories of Israel’s victories over greater enemies in scripture fostered a popular belief that God would rescue 1st century Judea from Roman oppression by sending his anointed one, or messiah, to lead Israel to political freedom[iv]. All the Jews had to do was remain faithful in spite of circumstances by keeping the Old Testament commandments[v]. In particular the first commandment, which forbids the worship of other gods, meant that faithful Jews could not be loyal to Caesar as Caesar’s claim to authority was that he was divine. So even if a Jewish tax collector was not the sort of monster described above, he was a heretic because he served another god, and he was a traitor because it was Jews serving other gods that caused God to get angry in the first place. For the faithful, tax collectors weren’t just tyrants who made their lives miserable, they were contributors to God’s anger and therefore part of the cause of the occupation.
Now imagine yourself in the shoes of the tax collector for a moment. You are rich, you are powerful, and everyone hates you. Being hated is nothing new for you, because that’s part of why you got the job. You were a jerk to begin with. Nobody ever really liked you very much and the feeling was mutual. You are probably short, ugly, and definitely mean. The closest thing to friends you have are your fellow tax collectors, but they are just as mean, spiteful and shifty as you are, so they’re not much for companionship. With access to almost unlimited power and wealth, your only real motivation to do anything is vengeance and avarice which means getting the contract to collect taxes is the best thing that ever happened to you because now you have the power to finally stick it to all those jocks and popular kids who made fun of you your whole life. The only problem is you are a miserable wretch. You are lonely and depressed. Nobody loves you. You’re probably an alcoholic, and the truth is, you know you’re a jerk and you don’t like yourself too much either. Perhaps worst of all, if you are Jewish, you are in a heaping pile of steaming excrement with God. Not only have you broken the first and greatest commandment by choosing to serve Caesar, but the Old Testament makes clear that anyone who goes around using their power and strength to oppress the weak, is going to have to answer for it one way or the other. All this is to say, if you were a jewish tax collector in the first century, you were likely unhappy, self loathing, lonely, and worried about the state of your soul.
So how would the tax collectors have heard Jesus’ message? There is probably not a facet of Jesus’ teaching that would not have had a specific meaning to the tax collector but for now I would like to focus the concept of Jubilee. According to Jewish law (Leviticus 25) every 50th year was to be honored as a year in which all debts would be forgiven. For Jesus the forgiveness of debts is not just a financial reality it is also a spiritual reality and the two are inextricably connected. That is, one may obtain forgiveness from God, but only if one also forgives their debtors. Perhaps the clearest statement of this is in his teaching on prayer where he tells us to pray “Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who are indebted to us.” This may sound strange because we are used to hearing the word “debts” translated as sins or trespasses, but the word that Jesus uses in the Greek is opheilema which literally refers to financial obligations [vi]. For tax collectors there would be very little doubt about how they could obtain salvation. They were in the unique position of being in a heap of debt with God, but also having literally everybody in debt to them. If they wanted to resolve their situation with God they simply had to forgive the debt of those who owed them money.
In case there is any chance the tax collectors might miss his point, Jesus actually tailors his message by putting into terms that the tax collectors can understand. Keep in mind that the tax collectors job was essentially that of a collector of debts. While he had the advantage of having everyone as his debtor he also had a boss, a chief tax collector, to whom he was essentially in debt. Now we know that these men were chosen as tax collectors because of their ruthlessness, so it is fair to assume that those who rose to positions of management in this field were the particularly ruthless. So if you were a tax collector you had the advantage of being able to be as greedy as you want and take everyone’s money, but you had the disadvantage of having an even greedier more evil boss who kept you in constant fear and was always accusing you of stealing. Jesus tells a number of stories that tax collectors would have understood very well, the primary example being the story of the wicked servant (Matt 18:21-35). In this story a man is forgiven a huge sum of debt only to turn around and refuse to forgive a small debt that is owed him. When the master who originally forgave the debt finds out about this he has the servant thrown into prison. Jesus makes clear that this is how God will treat people who don’t forgive. The tax collector was generally wealthy and may not have had too many debts that he could not pay but he did have one: his debt to God. If he wanted any hope of that debt being erased this story makes clear that he could not go on collecting taxes.
Luke 15 through 16:15 is another section where we can be sure that Jesus is directing his teaching toward tax collectors because it begins by telling us that all the tax collectors had come to hear him. According to the story some experts of the law who were also present had a problem with this and were complaining. Jesus tells four stories that address the concerns of the legal experts, while simultaneously driving home a powerful point to the tax collectors.
The first two stories are essentially the same: a man loses a sheep, and a woman loses a coin. When they find their lost items they rejoice/party with all their friends. It’s not hard to imagine that Jesus got a few blank stares from these two so he tells a story that hits a little closer to home: the story of the lost son. In this story there is a man with two sons. One day one of the sons demands his inheritance and leaves to go squander it another country. Eventually he runs out of money and is reduced to tending the pigs on a farm to avoid starvation. One day he finds himself thinking that the pig slop looks yummy, and he comes to his senses. If he could go back to his dad maybe he would take him on as a hired worker which would be better than envying pigs. So he goes back to his dad, but rather than being taken on as a worker his dad fully accepts him back as his son and throws a party with all his friends (15:29) to celebrate the return of his son. Meanwhile the brother who was a responsible son gets mad and complains about the fact that he never gets to party with his friends.
Jesus' message for the experts in the law is clear. He wants them to know that he is hanging out with tax collectors because God values them a lot, in fact he loves sinners just as much as he loves good people. His message for the tax collectors in these stories includes a little more. It is that they are valuable to God just as much as good people, but also that they are lost, that they have chosen a substandard life when they could have a good one, and that when they come back there will be a party involving friends.
At this point, we can be confident Jesus has caught the interest of at least some of the tax collectors. As mentioned before these men had all the power and money, but everyone hated and feared them. They had no friends, they never got invited to parties, and a good portion of them were well aware of the fact that they hated life and they hated themselves. What Jesus is offering sounds good, but so far it is unclear how exactly a tax collector is going to “come back” and what exactly this bit about partying and friends is all about, so Jesus tells one more story which is aimed at the tax collectors and is in the most concrete of terms so no one will be confused.
The story of the shrewd manager is basically the converse of the story of the wicked servant. In this story a shifty accounts manager is being accused of wasting his master’s assets. He knows he is going to get fired, and he is afraid of unemployment, so he decides to make sure that he will have plenty of friends while unemployed. He does this by making his last act as accounts manager that of forgiving up to half the amount due for all his master’s debtors. In the end even his master commends him for being shrewd. Jesus concludes by telling his audience that they should use their wealth to buy friends so that they will be welcome in “eternal homes”(16:9).
Now it’s tempting to want to say that this parable and the story wicked servant are both really illustrations of forgiveness and matters of the heart, resentment etc., but we cannot do this for two reasons: The first being that Jesus tells us this parable is about finances in 16:9, and the second being that he is speaking to people who are in the exact position of the main character of the story. Tax collectors are accounts managers.
When put in the context of the first three stories Jesus message to the tax collectors is this: You are very valuable to God, in fact God loves you like a son and as much as he loves good people, but you are lost and you have chosen a substandard life. You can come back if you want and you will be fully accepted, all you have to do is give half the money you have collected back to the people you collected it from. Then you not only will be in good standing with God but you will have lots of friends, and be invited to parties and stuff.
Now let’s just think about this for a minute. If verse 15:1 is to be taken literally, if Jesus really had an audience that consisted of all, not some, of the tax collectors then those in authority during Jesus’ time already had good cause to be concerned. Imagine how congress or the president might feel if some outsider suddenly had the entire IRS listening to them. Now think about what exactly Jesus is saying to this audience. In particular the main character of the last story betrays his master by essentially giving his masters money away. This would not have been any less illegal in Jesus’ day then it is today. Were Jesus’ parable a true story we could assume that this manager was punished severely, imprisoned, and maybe even killed for intentionally wasting his masters resources, but in Jesus’ story the master is symbolic of God and so he is pleased with the dishonest manager. Here is where Jesus’ message appears truly seditious: Having gathered all the tax collectors, the purse strings of the state, in one place Jesus is basically telling them that if they want to be fully accepted back into the family of God, they need to betray their human Roman masters and give the collected tax money back.
Again, some might be tempted to say that Jesus is really speaking of a spiritual reality in terms the tax collectors could understand, that he doesn't actually intend for the tax collectors to betray their masters. Luke, however, makes it clear that Jesus is speaking literally because he goes on to tell us of a tax collector who actually does what Jesus is suggesting here. In Luke 19, Jesus is at the height of his career. He has crowds following him and pressing against him, so much so that a short tax collector by the name of Zaccheaus is forced to climb a tree in order to see Jesus. When Jesus sees Zaccheaus in the tree he calls out to him and announces that he will be staying at Zaccheaus’ house that night. The crowds that are following Jesus are somewhat taken aback that Jesus would choose to stay with a tax collector when suddenly Zaccheaus announces that he will be giving half of his estate to the poor and will pay pack four times any amount he wrongfully collected. Jesus doesn’t correct Zaccheaus for misunderstanding his message but instead declares “Today salvation has come to this house.”(19:9) Now Luke doesn’t tell us what happens to Zaccheaus after this point but we can surmise that Zaccheaus went from being very unpopular to being popular. All the poor people who formerly hated and feared him suddenly saw him as a friend and a provider. Zaccheaus probably got invited to a lot of parties. He was also suddenly in very poor standing at work. He had taken government resources and squandered them on poor people.
Now that we understand Jesus’ message to the tax collectors, how do we understand his statement about taxes and Caesar in chapter 20? The answer lies in Jesus’ question “Whose image and whose inscription are on the coin?” but before we can get to that we need to understand the back drop of the question. Matthew tells us that those questioning Jesus had set out to trap him. They may have thought of it more as an attempt to nail him down on a hot button political issue, but the effect is the same. If Jesus were to tell people “Yes pay your taxes” he would be acknowledging the authority of a foreign god and thereby breaking the first commandment. If he were to say “no, don’t pay your taxes”, he would be advocating a tax revolution as not paying taxes brings the populace into violent conflict with the Roman occupiers. More importantly, were Jesus to advocate not paying taxes, those who were looking to accuse him would now have direct evidence with which to accuse him before Roman authorities. According to Luke the men who are questioning Jesus were experts in Jewish law, so Jesus is giving them an answer based in Jewish law. Verse 24 tells us that this coin was a denarius. We have denarii today so we know that the inscription reads “Caesar Augustus
Tiberius, Son of the divine Augustus”. The inscription on the coin pays homage to a foreign god, and is therefore in violation of the first commandment already. The reason Jesus asks them about the image is because he is bringing up the 2nd commandment which forbids making and worshiping or serving of images. The coin is undeniably an image of a foreign god, and the experts in the law implicate themselves as its servants by producing the coin from their possession and by assuming it is desirable and rightfully theirs. Interestingly enough the Greek word Jesus uses for image here is not the word from the second commandment but it is the word used in Genesis 1 when God makes people in his image.[vii]Jesus’ point is that while Caesar makes money in his image and is concerned with who owns the money, God makes people in His image and is concerned that His people remain His. The question for the legal experts should not be to whom their money belongs, but to whom their hearts belong, and their deep concern with money is evidence that their hearts are loyal to the wrong god.
Still it is perplexing that the same Jesus who disrupts the Roman tax system does not advise people to avoid paying taxes when directly questioned about it. Part of the answer to why is in the fact that Jesus, unlike the other messianic leaders of his time[viii], was unwilling to place the burden of changing an oppressive tax system on the victims. Rather than encouraging the oppressed to rise up in a bloody violent tax revolt which would ultimately lead to more misery for the already miserable Jesus works on the hearts of those who are perpetrating the extortion so that they change and give back that which they have taken. Jesus unties the bonds of oppression and eases the suffering of its victims without engaging in a violent destructive uprising.
People often wonder how a nice guy like Jesus who did nothing wrong could be executed by the government. Even Pilate, the Roman magistrate presiding over the trial of Jesus, seems to find no basis for the charges against him. We might be tempted to think that Pilate is a fair judge, but this is really more a testament to his incompetence. Keep in mind that Herod, a Jewish magistrate who had been appointed by Roman authorities, and Pilate become friends on the day of Jesus’ trial. The basis of their friendship seems to be a shared joke about Jesus being a wack job (23:11-12). It’s not that Pilate is sympathetic toward Jesus, he just doesn’t perceive the real threat. The charges against Jesus are that he is subverting the nation, forbids paying taxes and that he claims to be the messiah, a king. The charges are inaccurate in that Jesus did not actually forbid the paying of taxes, and he didn't outright say he was the King, but the heart of them is correct, in that Jesus does believe he is the King, and many in Israel are starting to believe that he is King as well, including many of the tax collectors, the purse strings of the state. Were things to continue the direction they were going Jesus would soon have the local government in a strangle hold by cutting off its life supply, its money. Pilate and Herod joke about it but Jesus’ accusers understand the real threat and know that Jesus has to die.
It’s easy to see Jesus’ statement “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” as fitting nicely into an American understanding of church and state, each with their own non-overlapping magesteria, but we have to understand that no such separation existed in the first century. Politics and spirituality were necessarily connected as is demonstrated by Caesars claim that he is a god. For Jesus to differentiate between what is Caesar’s and what is God’s, is to implicitly claim that Caesar is not God and therefore his claim to authority is invalid. Conversely, the claim that Jesus is Lord of heaven implies that he is rightful King of Earth. Were he to acknowledge that Caesar has a rightful place he would be acknowledging the authority of a foreign God, which was the basis of the trap in Luke 20. Jesus acknowledges no foreign gods and consequently he recognizes no man made government. Instead Jesus actively undermines the empire, attacking it at its weakest point, its purse. He practices his own message, loving the evil men who have betrayed their own to serve Rome, until they change and break loyalty with Rome and undo the oppression they were formerly a part of.
[i] Ramsay, MacMullen, Roman Social Relations 50 B.C. to A.D. 284 quoted by Elliot, Neil in The Arrogance of Nations (pg 91) Fortress Press 2010
[ii] Sly, Dorothy Philo’s Alexandria pg 2 Routledge 2013
[iii] This observation came fromhttp://whatistaxed.com/who_would_jesus_tax.htm an interesting if not scholarly resource. Special thanks for the “data mining” they did regarding Jesus and taxes.
[iv] See Yoder, John The Politics of Jesus pg 83 Eerdsman Publishing 1994
[v] Josephus Antiquities of the Jews 17 chapter 2 Here Josephus describes the Jews association of calamity with the breaking of the law.
[vi] Yoder, John The Politics of Jesus pg 62
[vii] See comment 20 Matt 20:22 Net Notes https://net.bible.org/#!bible/Matthew+22
[viii] Josephus Antiquities of the Jews 17 chapter 10
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