Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Official Report 1076KB pdf

Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection, and our leader today is the Rev Dan Robertson, the minister of Davidson’s Mains parish church.

Presiding Officer and members of the Scottish Parliament, thank you for the opportunity to address you today.

I wonder what your earliest memory of the nativity story is. Maybe you got to play a part at school. If you did, I wonder what part you played and what you thought of that part, because there was a definite pecking order, and, even at that young age, we knew that. Top billing went to Mary and Joseph, then came the angel Gabriel and the wise men. Below them were the angels in the choir and then the lowly shepherds. The higher the billing, the more important you were and the closer you got to Jesus.

I remember the Joseph of my nativity feeling that being Joseph made him a somebody rather than a nobody. Some of that came out in less-than-good ways, because thinking that you are somebody and that others are nobodies has a habit of coming out in less-than-good ways.

I know about Joseph because that was me. What I missed as a five-year-old, and for many years afterwards, was that the Christmas story turns the whole pecking order on its head. It speaks of a teenage mother, a carpenter stepdad, outsiders and those looked-down-upon shepherds being invited to get up close and personal with Jesus, who Christianity claims is actually God. It speaks of self-important King Herod being repelled. The Christmas story speaks of a loving down-to-earth God who comes into this beautiful and broken world to save us from our “I’m a somebody and they’re a nobody” inclinations.

At Christmas, Christ calls us to reconsider the pecking order way of living, which either sinks us when we fail to live up to other people’s standards, or our own, or puffs us up with pride and leaves us looking down on others.

The Christmas story calls us to consider that we are all more fragile, insecure and self-centred than we care to think, and that we are more loved, welcomed and wanted than we dare to believe. It goes on to deliver the good news that, in Christ, we have a God who is dying to love us, dying to forgive us and dying to be our friend, and that he is one whose love is stronger than death, if he rose from the dead as is claimed.

Jesus invites us to consider our value, the value of others and how close to him we want to get.

Merry Christmas and happy new year. [Applause.]