Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Official Report
712KB pdf
Time for Reflection
Good afternoon. The first item of business this afternoon is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is the Rev David Denniston, who is parish minister of St Cuthbert’s parish church in Edinburgh.
The Reverend David Denniston (St Cuthbert’s Parish Church, Edinburgh)
Presiding Officer and members of the Scottish Parliament, I thank you most warmly for this opportunity to offer today’s time for reflection.
In John’s gospel, we read:
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
Over the Christmas season, the familiar story will again be heard—the story of Mary and Joseph, angels and shepherds. The story also makes mention of some rather important people. The wise men who travelled from afar to visit the infant and pay homage no doubt held positions of some significance in their society. Certainly, King Herod was a man of some power—power that he exercised with considerable brutality. With even greater authority than Herod was Quirinius, the governor of Syria and, of course, there was none more powerful or influential than Caesar Augustus himself.
All those people are to be found in the biblical account, yet powerful, renowned, feared and significant although they may have been, it is not they who are the focus of the Christmas story. They have, at best, walk-on parts. Instead, the story centres on the birth of a baby that takes place in rather inauspicious circumstances in a somewhat insignificant Judaean town. Of all those who are named in the story, it is the baby whose name is best known, whose influence is most significant and whose birth is still celebrated. Wise men, kings, governors and emperors walk across the pages of human history. They come and they go, they do good or do ill, they have their day and then time moves on, as do they and as will we.
It is of that little baby that it was said:
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
What seemed of least significance was, in fact, the most significant thing of all. All those people who seemed so important at the time are yesterday’s news and history’s footnotes.
God grant that we all have the discernment and the wisdom to perceive that which has true and lasting significance, and that we not be seduced by that which has merely the outward trappings of importance.
May God bless this Parliament now and in the coming year of 2012, and may his light, which darkness will not extinguish, lead us all into the future.