Tax collector

On the other hand, there's a small but important contingent of activists among the Edo Highlife musicians who will criticize politicians directly if they feel the need.

For example, Benin musician Johnbull Obakpolo criticized Oshiomole for excessive taxes in his song Tax Collector, a Northern Agenda President.

Osho, Osho, who you be? You be tax collector.

Osho, Osho, who you be? You be tax collector.

There, there is this theory that, uh, you know, musicians sing the states, you know, singing the states.

You know, that means you're singing in praise of the states.

Yeah, so if you've not been here over the summer, I guess most of you probably have been, but we've been doing this kind of series, mini-series on parables of Jesus.

And today, obviously, we've got the persistent widow and the Pharisee and the tax collector, Luke chapter 18.

And one of the things that's always struck me about this first one, particularly the persistent widow parable, is the way in which it kind of highlights something about parables which we sometimes kind of miss, which is that, you know, not all the details in the parable have to match exactly to the thing that they represent.

You know, sometimes when you hear people talk about parables, there'll be a lot of kind of drawing a lot out of not necessarily very much in the text, you know, and sometimes you kind of press all the details really, really hard.

And so this, I think, is something that we see a lot throughout the book of Luke, particularly.

Luke is very fond of kind of turning these social things on their heads a little bit and particularly elevating the poor and the those who are sort of socially outcast in some way.

He's very fond of doing that, and that, I think, brings us to the next parable, the Pharisee and the tax collector.

Once again, we have two contrasting figures, one of whom is high social standing, which is the Pharisee, and another who is of extremely low social standing as a tax collector.

Crime was minimal.

I mean, taxes, Mr. Wilson, that's-- he's named in Taxman.

Yeah, yeah.

As much as 90% or something.

David Crowley has never met a tax that he doesn't want to increase.

I mean, he is the tax collector of Milwaukee.

When he was in the legislature, he voted against reducing taxes for working-class people when that tax cut came before us in the legislature, and he's raised property taxes every year except one.

one.And-

He's going to raise them.

He is a Milwaukee politician.

He is the tax collector for Milwaukee, and on, uh, while, uh, we ...

Uh, excuse me, increasing taxes, he's running up deficits.

Bright, 26.

Tax Collector, which I never saw, 17%.

But this is where it gets weird because he's done two...

Jason Statham films back to back.

If you've ever thought any of those mean things, okay, it's not good, but I promise you it's nothing compared to what any of the people around Matthew thought about him, okay? So, Sam Matthew is a great apostle, but before he was a great apostle, people didn't just simply dislike him.

him, okay, as a tax collector, they despised him.

Okay, and the reason they despised him, we've kind of been through this before, but the idea of a tax collector, it wasn't like a job that you just applied for.

It was the idea of, I am now with the enemy.

I've betrayed my people, okay? I've essentially left the faith.

So people like Matthew, like Zacchaeus, were despised.

And it would be easy for us to say, why aren't the people compassionate? Why aren't the people whatever? But really, if you think about it, it kind of makes sense.

The way a tax collector would make his money, essentially, was that the government would tell him, you need to collect X amount.

And one which Rome never really fully solved in all its years was tax collection.

Unlike many modern governments today, Rome enlisted private tax collectors.

There was, as I'm sure you can imagine, tremendous corruption and the locals began developing an immense hatred towards Rome.

The way tax collection worked essentially was the government would say to these private companies who were known as publicani, I need X amount of money from this region.

And then the tax collectors would bid.

Uh, and then whoever gave the highest bid above that minimum amount would get the job, right?

So if say you were a tax

This time, the Romans send Lucius Licinius Licullus.