No Taxation Without Meditation

Yesterday was tax day, so of course nobody’s very happy. Disgruntled citizens assembled to lob teabags onto the White House lawn but didn’t have the proper permit. Someone finally heaved a box of Lipton over the railings, an act that sent Secret Service agents and ultimately a robot onto the North Lawn to defuse or safely detonate the cache of orange pico. In Austin, governor Rick Perry attended a tea-tantrum and muttered vaguely about revoking the United States’ right to be a part of Texas.

Nothing new here. Taxation apparently goes all the way back in human history, and well beyond the human species. Marc Hauser of Harvard University says that when a rhesus monkey scores some high-grade chow, like coconuts, he lets out with a holler that brings the rest of the troop running to cash in on his find. He can always keep mum and scarf the vittles up by himself, but if he gets caught the other monkeys beat the tar out of him and gobble all the goodies anyway. Young male miner bell birds Down Under have to feed the dominant male’s brats and stand sentry duty over the nest or the big guy wallops them good, and vampire bats expect a gorged colleague to barf blood for his buddies to share.

But these days, it seems like we have taxation on steroids - or crack. As personal incomes plummet, tax revenues crash. This leaves money-starved municipalities looking for creative ways to cash in. For instance, if you cause a wreck in Winter Haven, Florida, the local authorities bill you for the cost of sending out the cops. Ohio’s pending state budget packs a punch of 150 new or increased fees. Washington D. C. plans to assay a “streetlight user fee” of $4.25 per month and New York City will mulct you a c-note for idling your car near a school for over a minute.

And, of course, the people passing the laws and profiting from the fees are never the ones who actually have to scoop up the money. Meg Seymour, town clerk of Londonderry, New Hampshire, who did not create the $25 fine on non-renewed dog licenses in her town, tells the New York Times, “Let’s just say that we’re the ones who take the venting. You have no idea.”

See, people don’t like paying taxes, they really don’t like paying new taxes, and they’ll holler at any target that presents itself.

Welcome to the world of Levi the tax collector.

Mark 2.14 introduces Levi (aka’ed elsewhere in the Gospels as Matthew), perched on a stool in his tax booth near the seashore in Capernaum. Note a couple of important things here. First of all, Capernaum sat on a newly-minted border between territories carved out in the turf war between the three sons of Herod the Great. When the old man died the boys set up new boundaries and, as governments tend to do, began charging fees to cross lines that, a generation ago, didn’t exist. You literally got hit going and coming. The old timers recalled the days before this system existed and it doubtless peeved them to shell out for what once was gratis.

Second, Matthew’s physical presence at the point-of-pay means that he ranked pretty low on the revenuers’ food chain. Luke evidently invents a word for Zaccheus, whose biblical business card reads, “chief tax collector” (Lu 19.2). Zaccheus hired guys like Matthew to get out there and actually shake people down; that’s why the little fellow had time to attend parades and shinny up sycamores. So Matthew got the dirty looks, the death threats, the slashed tires on his Yugo and the graffiti on his tax booth. And the teabags on his lawn, come to that.

Then Jesus, with a fine catch of professional fishermen on his stringer, happens by and includes Matthew in the kingdom. For all we know, Matthew had been slapping liens on Peter & Company just days before, and now he’s one of the boys. I’ve heard people claim that the Lord recruited Levi because he needed somebody with a head for figures to handle the finances. Wrong on two counts: First of all, Jesus put Judas in charge of the checkbook, and we all know how that worked out. Secondly, the last we see of Matthew’s shop there’s an “Out of Business” sign hanging on the door. Oh sure, by the next day they’d hired another drone, but Our Lord stages a one-day revolution that lets Rome know her time has come. You can’t use the story of Matthew to argue that church should be run like a business, since Matthew’s actions are a crazy business indeed.

So what lessons does the Lord have for us a day after April 15? Let’s try a few:

1. Might as well go ahead and render to Caesar. Hold out on him and he’ll send his boss monkeys to crack your coconut.

2. Don’t snarl at the clerk who takes your check for the parking fine. She’s just trying to do her job, and she gets the same money whether you pony up or not. It isn’t as if she works on commission.

3. Expect strange company if you journey on the Kingdom trail. You may have to shake a hand that was in your pocket yesterday, let someone cry on your shoulder who not long ago was breaking your back.

4. Find ways to leave the tax booth. Slinging teabags at the first family probably won’t have much effect beyond making Bo sick when he scarfs one. Kingdom creativity should open more than hearts - it should open minds to see new ways of opting out of systems of oppression.

Oh, and this one for free: never let a freshly-fed vampire bat mistake you for a member of the clan.

This entry was posted on April 16, 2009 at 10:15 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.