Divine Plagiarism

Reading an old book yesterday, I run across a story of a young Jewish street preacher talking to a tax collector. ‘They said He was an outlaw,’ for those of you old enough to remember Larry Norman (which is not me, I heard the remix.) The Preacher invites the tax collector to dinner. At that dinner the tax collector turns away from his corrupt ways, giving half of his money to the poor and offering to repay all the people he has cheated. Thus, Zaccheus goes from lost to found.

A cardinal rule of sociology is verstehen, the idea that actions must be considered in their context. To take the act out of its environment is to lose much of its meaning. Hermeneutics is another big word that people pay a lot of money to learn. It basically means ’a method of reading and understanding a text.’ It shares with verstehen the concept of context. You can’t get all of what Jesus was saying just by running a BabelFish translation and cutting and pasting His words into 21st century suburban America. Really, it’s not so cosmic a concept. Imagine a man doing some home repair in the privacy of his garage. He misses with a hammer, and smashes his thumb with a hammer, resulting in a loud expletive. Now imagine the same man in the middle of a crowded coffee shop, shouting out the same word at the same volume after spilling hot coffee on himself. The very same act means something very different when the context is changed.

So to the story of the Tax Collector. Nobody likes a taxman. Especially not a corrupt one. And this is what we see when we hear this story without context. Through the lens of American suburbia, Zaccheus is something like Boss Hog from the Dukes of Hazzard. Unpleasant guy, always taking things that aren’t his, but we something of a comic character, especially given his diminutive stature. The kind of guy that would have oboes and goofy music as their theme on a movie’s soundtrack. Now let’s think about the real context. Go back to your idea of Boss Hog, but put him as a character in the atrocious film Red Dawn. (Attacking through Texas, come on. There’s enough shotguns and pickup trucks to stop an armored division. Assault weapons ban, whatever.) Imagine that he is a former citizen of the town who pledged his allegiance to the Russians. Now imagine that the Russians arbitrarily execute whoever they feel like whenever they think the town is getting uppity. And imagine that the Russians want to extract as much wealth as they can from the town, so they hire people like Boss Hog to do their extracting, and whatever he wants to take out on top is up to him. If you don’t like it, you get sent to a KGB prison. Maybe instead of any flavor of Boss Hog, think the Tory from the Patriot who burns his own people to the ground. Minus any sense of loyalty, duty, or honor. Puts it in somewhat of a different light, doesn’t it. Maybe instead of oboes and goofy music, the soundtrack shifts to the Imperial Death March.

Sell-out. Turncoat. Traitor. This is the tax collector in context. The villain in any Disney film, the coward who transforms into a bully when he finds a way to wield power over others. Even if he has to betray all loyalties to country, family and neighbor to do so. Even if he has to become an agent of Rome the oppressor. People like to level the charge ‘oppressor’ pretty freely these days. Rome legitimately was one. Not because they said mean things once in a while. Not because there was a glass ceiling, or systemic racism. Not because they didn’t tiptoe around a given, arbitrary set of rules labeled ‘politically correct.’ Rome was oppressive, using any definition. They sucked. They established their rule under the deadly force of the Legions, and anyone who resisted that rule were executed in the most cruel and brutal ways imaginable. Unless you were a Roman citizen, you lived and died at the whims of the Emperor. They took what they wanted, did what they wanted, and if you did anything at all to fight back, you found out exactly how oppressive they could be. They established governors to keep people in line, not to represent the people’s interest. Unless they were Roman people, of course. These governors commanded battalions of troops and a bureaucratic civil apparatus to maintain control. One element of this apparatus was the tax collector. Therefore, the tax collector is a breathing symbol of Rome, of political oppression, and of imperialism.

Back to Zaccheus. If there ever was a platform for Christ to confront the evils of imperialism, it was his confrontation with the tax collector. If ever there was a sermon to be preached on public morality, or on the evils of political oppression, or on the imposition of control over the will of the people, it was then.
Yet there was no such sermon. Jesus doesn’t lecture him on the evils of Rome. There are no lectures on the correct amount of tariffs, nor how Roman hegemony is the physical manifestation of the powers and principalities. I am sure that the God who established governments could have established a pretty good constitution or could have led a pretty successful workers’ revolution. He did neither. When He was confronted with Zaccheus, the breathing symbol of all that was evil about Rome, all He saw was a broken man in need of a Savior.

I find it interesting that Jesus didn’t tell him to quit collecting taxes. Much like the soldiers who asked John the Baptist if they should resign their posts, Zaccheus was answered simply, being told to be content with his wages. I find this especially interesting, given that Christ had little problem telling prostitutes that they needed to change their lines of work. He does not tell this to either soldiers or tax collectors. Zaccheus was the agent of an imperialistic, oppressive government. Yet, Christ turns Him into His agent in that same imperialistic, oppressive government.

We still have a ‘first things’ problem. We see political oppression and injustice as the disease. They are symptoms. We are faced with a man with cancer and we are trying to his halitosis. There is no way that a Jewish carpenter growing up in Roman-occupied Judea would not notice political injustice and oppression. Certainly the zealots around Him did. But yet, He hardly addresses it at all. He seems to go out of His way to avoid the issue. It is almost as if He expects political oppression to exist as a derivative function of a much graver oppression. As if He views that graver oppression as the real problem to be fixed. As if He thinks the war is against powers and principalities and the forces of this present darkness. I do not believe that Jesus did not notice the injustice of Rome. I believe He saw it as collateral damage from the real war, and that the way to undo that damage was to win that real war.

I believe with all my heart that God calls men and women to impact their culture for Him. Many abolitionists were driven by their faith in Christ to pursue social justice. Dr. King’s fight for civil rights drew heavily upon his faith in God to see him through. A large number of Pro-Lifers today see Christ as the center of their activism. Certainly we should be salt and light, but there is a danger in confusing the Great Commission with things that are not spreading the Gospel. It is a good thing to fight for the powerless, to confront the wrongs around you, or even to pour your time into humanitarian work. But none of these are the Great Commission. There is a temptation to use these things as a substitute for our real duty: ‘go in to all the world and make disciples.’ Here we see the seduction of the Social Gospel: it provides us a ‘conscientious objector’ clause to the Great Commission. It allows us to skip much of the discomfort and much of the persecution of the call. It is far easier to joust with invisible dragons at dinner parties than it is to tell those friends about Christ. But it will not yield the same result. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the Spirit is mightier than both. Lose your life and you will find it. Know Christ and make Him known, and you will find the change you seek. The more people that become future citizens of New Jerusalem, the more our current world will look like New Jerusalem.

Give to Caesar. This is how Christ answers those who sought to draw Him into a political discussion. This should be our answer, as well. If you are a public servant, perform your duties well as unto Him. If you are a soldier, perform your duties well as unto Him. If you are a tax collector, perform your duties well as unto Him. If you are a citizen, perform your duties well as unto Him. We are called to serve Him where we are placed, not to talk about how we would change things if we were in charge of the political and economic structures. (Of course, if we are called to think about those structures, enact change in those structures, or reform those structures, then we should do those things just as well as unto Him.) He had more important things to do than to patch holes in a sinking ship. As do we.