Fighting violence and terror with love

The dreadful reality of violence has been brought home to us this year in the terrible murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich, followed by the beheading of Alan Henning and David Haines by terrorists. Such random and pointless violence is disturbing. Yet such killing is not new.

The events of the first Christmas were marked by an act of mass murder, committed by the state. The gospels recount how the Wise Men came seeking the Christ child. When King Herod the Great heard that it had been prophesied that a ‘King of the Jews’ had been born, he asked the Wise Men to return to tell him where the baby was to be found.

Herod said that he too wished to visit and pay homage. Instead he initiated a genocide, killing all the babies in and around Bethlehem who were two years or under. Mary and Joseph fled with the baby Jesus to Egypt, like stateless asylum seekers.

It was in the midst of such evil that Jesus, the Prince of Peace, was born. Throughout his life he challenged the people of violence and the regimes that sought to control through fear and oppression.

He carried and used the most unlikely weapon in the war on violence and terror, a weapon called love. He carries it still.

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