Address given at the Parliamentary Carol Service 2025

May I start by thanking you for the invitation to speak this afternoon. I consider it an honour and privilege. Can I also thank you on behalf of the nation (if I may dare to do so) for your dedicated public service, as fellow peer, members of the House of Commons, all the support staff who enable our work and the families and friends gathered here who help us with the long hours that such work often entails.  I suspect such appreciation doesn’t fill your inboxes on a regular basis. I observe across both houses a passion for justice, inclusion and care which is exemplarary.  That should be celebrated and appreciated much more than it is. If you remember nothing else about this address, I hope you will remember that. 

You will no doubt remember Spike Milligan who is buried in Winchelsea in my former Diocese. Apparently, he requested his gravestone should carry the epitaph, ‘I told you I was ill!’ The Diocesan Chancellor was less than enthusiastic about this deviation from faculty rules and refused.  However, Spike had the last laugh.  If you visit his grave today you will find the inscription there as requested; its just written in Greek! In the end he got a highly appropriate legacy.

The danger for everyone involved in public life is an ego driven desire for legacy which may be more about self-aggrandisement than a public-spirited desire to leave the world a better place. We all need to guard against such hubris. Our reading from Matthew this evening tells us of the legacy of a character with a bit part in the Christmas story, namely Joseph.  In Christ’s life he appears infrequently and only in the first few years, disappearing after the incident where Jesus is left behind in the Temple by mistake. In this passage, we hear the commentary on the legacy he leaves behind.  Joseph was a righteous man.  In the language of the scriptures there could be no higher accolade. He manifests this primarily in an act of profound kindness to Mary his betrothed.  In the ancient near east of that time a strict code was observed. Couples were promised to each other from an early age by their families.  Such betrothals were binding. If Mary had become pregnant in the normal way of things it was an egregious breaking of social convention and moral probity.  However, even before the angel’s revelation of what had really happened, he already responds to her vulnerability with kindness.  To have exposed her to public disgrace would have been to cast her on the mercy of her family who would most likely cast her off to avoid family shame.  The prospects for such a vulnerable, pregnant teenager cast adrift from family support were unthinkable. The same is true for many young women around the world today faced with a choice between starvation and sexual exploitation.

Joseph’s proposed actions demonstrated a kindness well beyond what law and convention would have demanded of him. He demonstrated a humanity, grace and love that responded to a vulnerable young woman. Law and regulation are a poor substitute for such humanity.  We spend a lot of our time on legislation – its our job, but I wonder if, like me, you occasionally think some of what we are doing is codifying our human duty of care for one another. In our society it feels like we don’t trust one another very much.  In the absence of such trust, we have to fall back on rules and regulations to protect both the vulnerable and ourselves.

To describe Joseph as righteous is to say he felt an accountability to a higher authority than mere social convention. The greatest of our statesmen and women have had a similar sense. There are more important sources of authority that political expediency, public opinion and social media mobs. But in the complexities of modern life, doing the right thing is not always straight-forward.  

For Christians, such wisdom is a divine gift. Jesus is described as Emmanuel: God with us. We dare to believe that a framework which leaves God out of the equation can’t give a reliable account of reality. There is a prideful streak in all of us that seeks to do just that. The scriptures call it sin: a turning from God; a collapsing in on ourselves as St. Augustine described it.  This is the condition from which we need saving and for which God sent Jesus – in a sense part of the fruit of Joseph’s kindness and Joseph and Marys’ preparedness to live with the whispers and accusations of illegitimacy. This salvation, the gift of forgiveness and the restoration of relationship with God opens the channel to the divine wisdom we so desperately need in the midst of the complexities of modern life.

Joseph’s epitaph was Joseph the righteous man. What might people say of us? Amen.