IN the Christian calendar Christmas, a festival of rejoicing, is swiftly followed by the sombre marking of Holy Innocents Day on December 28, writes Dr Timothy Bradshaw of Oxford University's department of theology.

This is a day which few preachers relish as it commemorates King Herod’s savage murder of babies in an attempt to kill Jesus, the baby being looked for by the Magi.

The Taliban, just before Christmas, murdered over 100 schoolchildren in Pakistan, resonating horribly with Holy Innocents: such massacres still happen.

And now, just after the feast of Epiphany, when we celebrate the mysterious arrival of the Magi, or ‘Wise Men’ from the East who came to worship the Christ child as God’s self-revelation to all the world, we see on TV the news of more murder, of journalists in Paris.

The contrast of the utterly vulnerable baby Jesus being honoured by the strangers from afar, and the brutal murders, is too shocking to make sense of.

There is no sense to it: this is simply the chaos of evil, inexplicable, utterly absurd and sinful. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth defined sin as ‘what God does not want’.

The Christian faith can be seen quite simply as having two book ends: we begin with the baby, his mum and dad who struggled to find a safe place for the birth, and who were visited by shepherds and the three mysterious Eastern travellers, obeying a calling to find the child, the clue to meaning of the universe.

And at the end of his life this Jesus was judicially, religiously and politically murdered in the most painful, tortured way.

That is the purely human side of the story, and it is one of vulnerability and dependency.

God reveals his very nature through this person Jesus, desperately at risk as a child, and the victim of total injustice as a young man.

God reveals himself as love, as receiving love from his mum and dad, and as receiving sinful hate in response to his life modelling God’s will and kingdom among many struggling folk.

To the world his death looked like a humiliating defeat, in the deepest reality it was sheer victory, for the whole human race. His rising at Easter confirmed this victory over evil.

In the light of this love, revealing God’s nature as Christlike, how should we frame a response to the terrorist killings of children and of journalists?

We can only hope and pray that the killers themselves met with the judgement of God as they slaughtered the innocent children, judged by the shock and hurt in the eyes of the young ones.

And the brutal murder of unarmed journalists whose main aim was to uphold freedom of opinion and thought, again this somehow echoes savage violence meted out to Jesus, a man committed to living out the truth.

These murderous events already stand judged; they judge themselves as unbelievably inhumane, as ‘what God does not want’.

Perhaps the message of Epiphany, the coming of the strangers from the East to the babe of Bethlehem, finding in this vulnerable child the heart of God’s wisdom for all mankind, can be used by God to melt the hearts of killers claiming to act in God’s name – revealing that God ‘does not want’ this killing?

Our response must be Christlike: avoiding retaliatory hate, to pray that the Holy Spirit brings this to pass in their hearts.