Good afternoon. The first item of business today is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader this afternoon is the Rev Lynn McChlery, the minister of Eaglesham parish church, East Renfrewshire.
Good afternoon and thank you for the invitation to lead your reflections this afternoon.
I am here as a church leader speaking to politicians, which strikes me as particularly apt in this season of the Christian calendar. This is holy week which, for Christians, is the days leading up to Easter, when we reflect on the events that led to Jesus’s death. When we read about those events in the gospels, it is a bit of a challenge for us, because neither religious leaders nor politicians come out of the story with much credit.
It was the religious leaders of Jesus’s time who started the proceedings against him. They were so concerned to defend their own good tradition that they could not tolerate someone who spoke the same truth from a fresh and different angle, so they abused their power to preserve their own interests at the expense of others. No doubt they had lots of plausible sounding reasons to justify their actions.
It was the politicians who finished Jesus off. They were so concerned to impose their agenda and keep themselves in power that they settled for what was expedient rather than what was right—again, at the expense of those they ruled and, again, perfectly justifiable by their own standards.
So, holy week is a toxic mess of politics and religion and shows how badly wrong things can go when those are abused—something not lacking in the world today.
Yet, at the heart of Easter is another example: that of Jesus himself—someone who models a servant form of leadership and who never used power to further his own interest. He was someone whose life served the needs of the people least valued by his society and whose death was an act of self-giving love.
Most people who get into politics or religion do not do it because we are power-mad or ambitious for big salaries; there are lots of easier ways to make a living. Most of us do it because we want to change things for the better. We are easy targets for criticism. The snare of power or personal gain takes us by surprise. Often, the choices before us are much more complex than they seem to outsiders and we have to examine our motives and wrestle with our consciences. At those times, the Easter story offers us a reference point for how power can be used well or badly, and how leadership looks, at its worst and at its very best.
May I wish you all a well-deserved Easter break when it comes.