“IN THIS WORLD,” Benjamin Franklin once wrote in a letter, “nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” And perhaps a little eerily, he died five months later, at the age of 84.

Death and taxes are inevitable, and neither is particularly… well, popular. We may try to cheat death for a time, but know that death must come eventually. And we may vote to have more and higher taxes or fewer and lower taxes, but some kind of tax will probably always be necessary for the public good. We often complain about taxes in the United States, but the tax burden for the average American is actually less percentage-wise—sometimes far less—than it is for residents of many other developed nations in which the money typically goes toward more extensive government services.

So, the next time you’re tempted to complain about taxes or the Internal Revenue Service, try to imagine this nightmare scenario. The government needs its taxes, but decides to hire independent contractors to collect the money. For each geographical region, there’s a bidding war between contractors: who can promise to bring in the most taxes from the region? The contract goes to the highest bidder, and the contractor is now on the hook for that amount. But anything the contractor brings in over and above that amount is theirs to keep as pure profit. It’s a system that readily invites corruption. There’s only so much the government can do to rein in the abuse without changing the system at its roots.

But this is essentially how the collection of certain taxes worked in the Roman Empire during the time of Jesus. Tax collectors could be Gentiles or Jews, but Jews often made better tax collectors in the region of Judea because of their insider knowledge. Such individuals, naturally, were hated by their Jewish compatriots; they were viewed as traitors and cheats, and ceremonially unclean because of their constant association with Gentiles. It will be important to keep this in mind when we come to the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19. He wasn’t just a “wee little man” as the song would have it; he was a corrupt little man.

It’s significant, therefore, that tax gatherers were among the people who came out to the wilderness to hear the message of repentance preached by John the Baptist. Previously, we saw how John called some of the Jews in the crowd the “brood of vipers”; they were more children of the Serpent than children of Abraham. He warned them of the coming judgment.

But instead of arguing back or walking away, the crowd seemed to take the message to heart; their conscience was stricken. Luke writes:

“What should we do then?” the crowd asked. John answered, “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.” Even tax collectors came to be baptized. “Teacher,” they asked, “what should we do?” “Don’t collect any more than you are required to,” he told them. Then some soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?” He replied, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.” (Luke 3:10-14, NIV)

Luke doesn’t just give us a list of the kinds of people who were listening to John. He says, “even tax collectors came,” suggesting that Theophilus and other readers should be impressed not only that such corrupt people were in attendance, but that they were ready to repent of their corruption. After all, John already said that God could make children of Abraham out of mere stones, probably gesturing to the stones that lay all about him as he said it. If God can do that, then even people with the stoniest of hearts can repent.

With the fear of judgment upon them, the crowd asks, “What should we do?” Notice that the question is not “What should I do?” but “What should we do?” Individual and private sin isn’t the issue here; a sense of shared guilt for systemic corruption is.

Notice too how John’s answers are simple and direct responses to that corruption. He doesn’t tell tax collectors to find another job. Instead, he tells them to only collect what they were contracted to collect. It’s not a high-level ethical critique of the system, but concrete moral guidance for their everyday life: Stop soaking people for more taxes so you can reap a bigger profit.

He gives similar instructions to the soldiers. Where the New International Version has “extort money,” Luke has a single word in the Greek, whose root meaning is to “shake thoroughly.” Today, colloquially, we would say that soldiers were “shaking people down.” These men were underpaid and unhappy and took out their grievances on the population through intimidation and extortion. Similarly, the word translated as “accuse people falsely” was used of corrupt officials who profited through baseless slander. One imagines soldiers being used—perhaps even by tax-gatherers!—to squeeze money out of people using threats and false accusations. The soldiers, of course, benefited from this arrangement.

What both the soldiers and the tax collectors shared in common was the abuse of their power for personal gain. John didn’t deny that they had a right to make a living; he merely told them that it wasn’t right for them to make their living dishonestly at the expense of others. True repentance couldn’t be in attitude alone. It had to show itself in their behavior, and it was going to cost them something.

Something similar can be said of the crowd in general. When they asked what repentance required of them, John told them to share. What the NIV translates as “shirt” was the “tunic”; we might think of it as something like unisex underwear, worn next to the skin, under one’s other garments. Where clothing was concerned, it was a basic necessity. His message to the crowd then, overall, was that those who had more than what was strictly necessary with respect to food and clothing should care for those who did not by sharing what they had.

. . .

JOHN CRITICIZED HIS LISTENERS for not living in a way that demonstrated true repentance before God. But think about it: if I asked you to describe what true repentance would look like for you, what would you say? I’m guessing that for many of us, what would come to mind is some private and individual sin that no one else knows about.

That wasn’t John’s focus. The repentance he described was about relational justice and how we care for others. Those who had more should share with those who had less. Those who had power were not to abuse it. It would require people to stop living as if the only thing that mattered was their own security, well-being, or profit.

In the gospel of Matthew, both John the Baptist and Jesus come preaching a message of repentance: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (3:2, 4:17). And what we can already see in John’s preaching in Luke is this: God’s kingdom would be one in which people would aspire to love others as they loved themselves.