Thought for the week: Mr Zahawi and his taxes

According to one newspaper he has been obliged to pay £1 million pounds to His Majesty’s Revenue Commissioners to settle any outstanding income tax bill. The

politician asserts that the failure to pay the original tax demand was ‘careless and not deliberate’. Let’s hope so.

One is reminded of the American Leona Helmsley, known as ‘The Queen of Mean’. She lived extravagantly, but refused to pay her taxes. ‘Only the little people pay taxes,’ she boasted, because the wealthy have clever accountants who know how to exploit the subtle distinction between tax evasion and tax avoidance.

Christians who take seriously the words of the Lord Jesus Christ know that they have a duty to pay the tax they properly owe. On one occasion, Jesus was challenged about paying the Temple tax.

Although he could have framed a Messianic argument against paying the tax, he told Peter to go fishing and that in the first fish he caught he would find the necessary four-drachma coin (Matthew 17; 24-27).

On another occasion Jesus was confronted by the tricky political question of whether or not it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar. It was a cunning trap prepared by his enemies. Had he said ‘Yes’, he would have lost favour with the people. If he said ‘No’, he would then be seen by the Roman authorities as a dangerous incendiary.

His response – ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s (Mark 12; 17) – has left succeeding generations to tease out its moral implications. And surely one of the applications of that enigmatic saying is that a responsible citizen ought to pay the taxes that are properly due.

Since, as Paul said, ‘the powers that be are ordained of God’ (Romans 13;1), payment of the taxes they set is a Christian responsibility. The story is told of one man who sent a cheque to the Inland Revenue with an accompanying letter which read: “Dear sir, my conscience has been bothering me. Here is a cheque for £1,000 I owe in back taxes. P.S. If my conscience still bothers me, I’ll send the rest”.

It is a subterfuge no Christian should engage in.