As soon as Herod was dead, Jewish patriots in Judea took advantage of the occasion to vent their revenge on the security forces, and this brought the Romans on the scene. The disturbances were ruthlessly suppressed by Varus, the Roman military commander who, as a punishment and a deterrent, had 2000 men publicly crucified. (2)

Thirty years later Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, sentenced to the same death the Man who once had been the Holy Child of Bethlehem.

So the difference between those times and our own is not so wide after all. Human nature is the same, and the lust for power, the ready resort to violence and all the callousness and cruelty which comprise “man’s inhumanity to man” – all that is with us still.

But what illuminates and transfigures the whole sombre, brutal scene is the fact that that Child so dear and gentle is not only Man but the Lord God himself, who was born into the world which he himself had made, who lived in it and suffered in it.

It is that cardinal fact which alone makes sense of this otherwise senseless world and which alone makes sense of God.