Even tax collectors came to be baptized. “Teacher,” they asked, “what should we do?” – Luke 3:12

Today’s Scripture Reading (August 7, 2014): Luke 3

If we are honest, there are people in our lives who we just simply expect nothing from. I hear about them in conversations all the time. These are the ones that we feel have let us down before, and there is no reason to expect that they will never repeat the process. And so we approach these people carefully. On the outside we often respond with the sentiment “I’m just not going to get my hopes up.” But the other side of the reality is that as soon as we have uttered those words, we have often already raised our own hopes. It is easy to put up the guard on the outside, but often not so easy to put the guard up on the inside.

I was recently talking to a young couple about issues they were having within their own families. And what amazed me was that as they told me of all of the hurt that they had suffered, their own emotions were on the rise. They were saying all of the right things, they insisted that they were lowering their expectations of what was going to happen in the future, but they absolutely could not hide the hurt and the high expectations that were still there. With every fibre of their beings they seemed to be yelling - they have hurt us before and we don’t expect that to change, but we do anyway. We want it to change and we need it to change. Family can be like that.

Jewish society seemed to function very much like a big family, equipped with esteemed uncles and deadbeat cousins. And it was the task of the tax collectors played the role of the dead beat cousins. The tax collectors were the ones that had never before fulfilled the family responsibilities, and no one expected that they ever would. Specifically, tax collectors were often seen as supporting the wrong side. Rather than standing for the family (the Jews) in times of conflict, they supported the hated Roman occupiers of the land, even going as far as to collect tax money for them. And the way that they were paid was by collecting more than was required. Whatever excess that the tax collectors received, well that was their salary – that was the money on which they had to live. So a tax collector was not trusted. In truth, no one really knew what the bill was that the tax collector had to pay or how much extra money they collecting for themselves. And for this reason, the tax collectors were outcasts at every family gathering.

So the translators of the New International Version of the Bible insert the word “even” at the beginning of this sentence expressing the surprise of the people that the deadbeat cousin wanted to be part of the family discussions. And while the original Greek would not seem to contain this element (for instance, the King James Version has chosen to translate this phrase to start with the word “then” really simply indicating simple order) knowing what we know of the Jewish family the word “even” is justified. The dead beat cousin had heard the invitation, and even though no one expected it, he was finally responding.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Matthew 4