If you’re reading this today, you’ve probably done one of two things: filed your taxes weeks ago with the quiet satisfaction of a person who planned ahead or scrambled to hit submit before midnight with the desperate energy of someone outrunning a wildfire. Either way, you made it. Take a breath. It’s Tax Day.
And if there’s one phrase that perfectly captures the universal human experience of handing over money to the government, it’s the one Jesus himself delivered two thousand years ago: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” (Matthew 22:21)
It was true then. It’s true now. And the people who had to deliver Caesar’s cut? They were the most hated professionals in the ancient world. Tax collectors.
The Most Despised Profession in History
We think we have it bad today. But consider what it meant to be a tax collector in first-century Judea. Roman tax collectors, known as publicans, were Jews who purchased the right to collect taxes from Rome. They paid Rome upfront, then extracted what they could from their own people, pocketing the difference. They were traitors to their nation AND thieves to their neighbors. They were ceremonially unclean. They couldn’t testify in court. They were barred from the synagogue. In the social hierarchy of the day, tax collectors ranked somewhere below lepers.
And yet. Jesus kept showing up at their tables.
The Two Most Famous Tax Collectors in the Bible
Matthew, the very Gospel writer who recorded Jesus’s famous words about Caesar, was himself a tax collector. He was sitting at his booth in Capernaum when Jesus walked by and said two words: “Follow me.”
Matthew got up and left. Everything. The booth, the ledgers, the income, the corrupt comfort of collaboration. There was nothing superficial about it. He wasn’t networking. He wasn’t hedging his bets. He walked away from the most lucrative and reviled job in town to become one of the Twelve and to write one of the four accounts of Jesus’s life that would shape the entire Western world. That kind of response only comes from a heart that was already hungry for something the booth could never give him.
Then there is Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector of Jericho. If Matthew was hated, Zacchaeus was doubly so. He was the boss. He ran the operation. And yet when Jesus passed through his city, Zacchaeus didn’t send a representative or watch from a respectable distance. He ran ahead of the crowd and climbed a sycamore tree. A wealthy, powerful, grown man, shimmying up a tree just to catch a glimpse.
That is not the behavior of a man seeking social advantage. That is the behavior of a soul in genuine pursuit. He wasn’t performing. He wasn’t posturing. He was desperate, in the best possible way. And Jesus saw him.
The religious leaders were scandalized by both of them. “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” they demanded. Jesus’s answer was simple and devastating: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” (Matthew 9:12)
The ones most certain of their own righteousness were the ones farthest from grace. The ones everyone else had written off. They were the ones who went home changed.
Two Men, One Temple, One Verdict
In Luke 18, Jesus tells one of his most unsettling parables. Two men go to the temple to pray. The first is a Pharisee, respected, devout, tithing faithfully. He prays with his chin up: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people — robbers, evildoers, adulterers — or even like this tax collector.”
The second man is the tax collector. He won’t even look up. He beats his chest and whispers, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Jesus’s verdict stops the room: the tax collector, not the Pharisee, went home justified.
Humility, it turns out, has a better tax rate than pride.
Even John the Baptist Had a Word for Them
When tax collectors came to John the Baptist asking what they should do, he didn’t tell them to quit. He didn’t chase them off. He said: “Collect no more than you are authorized to.” (Luke 3:13)
Integrity. Inside a broken system. That’s always been the call.
Nothing Is Free: A Lesson Learned Across Continents
I’ve had the privilege, and the eye-opening reality check, of living and serving abroad. As a former Air Force officer, I was stationed in England and across Europe during the 1990s. And let me tell you, “render unto Caesar” took on a very different weight when Caesar was charging six British pounds per liter of petrol. We received gas coupons just to manage the cost of getting around.
Across the continent, the Value Added Tax (what Europeans pay on top of income tax, on virtually every purchase) averaged well over 20%. Today, that average sits at approximately 21.82% across EU member states, with countries like Hungary reaching 27% and Denmark, Sweden, and Croatia hitting 25%.
And the income tax? Throughout my travels, I always ask people about their lived experience, because that’s where the truth lives. I met person after person carrying tax burdens pushing 60%. One encounter that has stayed with me happened on a tour of Israel. Our guide was Danish. Warm, well-traveled, deeply thoughtful. When she found out I was American, the conversation turned, as it always does, to money and freedom.
“Yes,” she said, “we have free healthcare. Free university. Free this, free that.” She smiled. “But nothing is free. Someone is always paying.” Then she added something that has never left me: “And because it is free, it has no value. When people pay nothing for their education or their healthcare, they treat it as though it is worth nothing.”
She’s right on both counts. The bill always comes. And what costs us nothing, we treasure not at all.
Americans romanticize Scandinavian social systems without doing the math of what those systems extract from the people who fund them. I’ve seen it firsthand. I’ve talked to the people living it. And I came home genuinely grateful for what we have.
Yes, the Frustration Is Real
None of that gratitude is naive. I know where we are right now. Many of us are watching taxes get collected and then watching those funds get mishandled, misappropriated, or simply vanish into the machinery of a system that has forgotten who it serves. That’s not paranoia. That’s observation.
The ancient publicans exploited people for personal gain within a corrupt imperial structure. Sound familiar? The problem of power and money corrupting each other is not a modern invention. It is as old as human nature itself.
But here’s what Scripture also shows us: God was not deterred by corrupt systems then. He walked into the middle of them and called individuals out of them, one at a time.
Grace Lands Where Pride Won’t Go
Matthew didn’t reform the Roman tax system. He left his booth and wrote a Gospel.
The tax collector in the temple didn’t have a political platform or a protest sign. He had a broken heart and an honest prayer. And he went home justified.
John the Baptist didn’t tell the collectors to bring down the empire. He told them to do their job with integrity.
On this Tax Day, maybe the invitation is the same for all of us: render what is Caesar’s without bitterness. Hold onto what is God’s without apology. Stay grateful for the freedom others around the world are still paying for, in ways we can barely imagine. And remember that no corrupt system, no broken institution, no mishandled treasury has ever been able to stop grace from finding its way to the person who genuinely cries out for it.
We were never promised control over Caesar. But we are always accountable for the condition of our own hearts.
The tax collector went home justified. There’s still hope for all of us.
