The old Despicable Me............

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Nobody likes the tax collector

In the modern world where we write a check (for the old fashioned among us) and put it in the mail with our quarterly estimated tax, the tax collector is just a PO Box far away.  If your income and social security taxes are taken out of your pay check each week, then you are twice removed from the tax collector....even if you gripe about the chunk that disappears from your earnings.  I expect if we had to hand over cash to someone down the street from us, we wouldn't be particularly fond of the tax collector either. In fact, it would be pretty easy to harbor nasty thoughts and attitudes towards the tax collector.

Jesus didn't mind.  Well, maybe that's not completely true.  Jesus didn't allow the man's vocation to stand between him and an experience of God's love in Jesus.  More than that, Jesus intentionally addresses....and then invites himself to dinner at the Chief Tax Collector's house.

Being a tax collector wasn't a deal breaker for Jesus. The people weren't happy that Jesus was honoring this man with his presence but Zaccheus is more than willing to make amends for any wrongful tax he has collected, repaying folk fourfold.  In the end, Jesus announces that on this day, this very tax collector comes to know salvation.   [See the story of Zaccheus, a wee little man  who had a very big job, in the gospel of Luke 19.1-10]

It is easy to focus our resentment, exhaustion and disappointment on someone else.  It is easy to make 'the other' the source and cause of the hard scrabble life we live.  It is easy to attribute all kinds of nastiness and thievery to this other one.  Some call this person a scapegoat.  In Israel that day they called him the Chief Tax Collector.  He was the guy everyone loved to hate.

Except Jesus.   There is no 'other' in the eyes of the one who created all and loves all creation.  There is no 'other' to the one who takes on the power of evil for the sake of those he loves.  There just simply is no 'other'.  We are all loved alike, loved into life.

Boy do we find it hard to simply accept this kind of radical grace.  We want to parse it and dole it out to the worthy ones, punishing the not worthy ones.  We need 'the other' to be the strawdog against which we stand and look good.

Yet when Jesus looks at us, we already look good....because he looks at us with eyes of love.