11 December 2025

Almost sixty years before slavery was abolished, the Jamaican slave, Joseph Knight, took his master, Sir John Wedderburn, to the High Court in Edinburgh to fight for his freedom. He won his case in 1778 – and the humanity of Scotland’s law court was widely celebrated.

One of the arguments being considered at the time centred on the Sacrament of Baptism. Although it was never incorporated into the law of the land, it was considered by the people that because Joseph Knight had been baptised, his status had changed. He was now a free man.

The most significant thing about his baptism was not the sprinkling of the water per se but the fact that it took place in public. It was like a rite of passage within the local community. And the local community respected this. In his baptism into Christ, the slave had become one of them. He was their brother!

The truth will out. We are all children of God born into a common humanity, brothers and sisters of the Christchild, a baby without speech, a King without power whose Word will stand forever in all  the fragility of manger and green hill far away.

‘Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.’ for we are all guilty of distorting the image of God in those who are different, foreign, peculiar, strange. But the truth will out. We are one with Christ and one with each other in that upside down world where a fourteen year old gives birth to the Saviour of the world.

She was more fair than ye have look’d upon;

She was the moon, and he her little sun.

O Lord, we cry’d, have mercy on us all!

But ah! quod she, he is so sweet and small.