Tom Butler: King Herod, oil, and Saddam's power games

Anybody who claims they can steer a moral path through this crisis is either naive or a charlatan

Christmas 2002 has an apt icon in Pieter Bruegel's paintingThe Adoration of the Magi. In the centre of the picture, the holy child receives homage from sumptuously attired kings. In the small patch of sky at the top of the painting, the spears and swords of soldiers are criss-crossed. Of course, the Magi aren't there at Christmas – they come later. But uppermost in many minds this Christmas is the question of what might come later.

The traditional Christmas story, unlike so many modern Christmases, doesn't end on Christmas Day. It carries on, with the joyful coming of the Magi and with the psychologically terrifying Slaughter of the Innocents – the murder by King Herod of all male children under two in his attempt to kill the Christchild. The focus shifts from the heavenly child and angelic choirs to the murderous Herod and the Holy Family's flight for sanctuary to Egypt.

Two thousand years or so later, the picture is much the same. The celebrations are as frantic as usual, with the normal joyful expectation and family feuding. But this year there is an underlying sense of anxiety and even fear as war with Iraq moves from the possible towards the probable. There will be many sermons this Christmas making the link between the Slaughter of the Innocents following hard on the heels of the divine birth at Bethlehem, and war with Iraq following hard on the heels of Christmas 2002.

The quest for power dominates both events. King Herod had never managed to win the hearts and minds of the Jewish people. He was a brilliant yet ruthless man. He slaughtered his own sons when he sensed disloyalty – and yet he also sold the palace plate and gave the proceeds to the starving during a period of famine. The temple he had built at Jerusalem was one of the wonders of the world, its white marble glittering like a snow-covered mountain, but it was built with the proceeds of a harsh system of tax collection, which demolished villages that did not meet their obligations.

Herod would not have bothered himself with the theological niceties of a divine king being born in Bethlehem, but as far as he was concerned there could only be one king of the Jews and he himself occupied the post, so any rival must be eliminated. However, the child he was after had already slipped away, and Herod was dead before he returned, though Herod need not have feared, for the power of Jesus was of a different order to his own.

Power is at the heart of the shadow cast over this Christmas. There are the power games of Saddam Hussein, remarkably similar to King Herod in his grip on his own people and instinctive suspicion of anything that might threaten his regime. There is the new power of international terrorism, where suicide fighters armed only with penknives can undermine the self-confidence of the most powerful nation on earth. There is the military power of that nation and its allies including our own country. There is the power of oil undergirding the influence of Islamic nations in the Middle East and of multinational companies whispering into the ears of Western governments.

But who are the innocent who may be the victims of "the slaughter of the innocents" this time around? The civilian population of Iraq in the event of war? Certainly, the sufferings and death already caused through sanctions imposed by the West would be intensified, in the short term at least. But if there truly are weapons of mass destruction squirrelled away in Iraq and they are not dealt with by war or other means, then another set of innocent victims appear – random bystanders in any city on earth targeted by terrorists. We are all both potential Herods and potential slaughtered innocents in this modern nativity tale.

Anybody who claims to be able to steer a clear Christian or moral path through the power games of this present crisis is almost certainly either naive or a charlatan. But that does not mean that the Christian gospel of then has nothing to say now.

By the time the slaughter first began in the first nativity story, the Christchild had slipped away, while earthly power did its worst. He would be back to display a different kind of power – of truth, authority and holiness at an apt moment, and truth, divine authority and holiness in their pure forms are remarkably resilient even in the face of centuries of human horror, even when they are abused to feed that horror.

Our challenge is not only to decide whether to go to war or whether to refrain from war, but also to bring about the apt psychological moments in our own time when a different way of doing things can be heard above the clamour. It is in times of war, and rumours of war, that fundamental questions are raised about how we human beings treat one another – and it is in times of war that we discover something new about what it means to be human.

This Christmas, we are nervous in the midst of joy, fearful in the face of the future. In the first nativity, ordinary people heard extraordinary sounds: angel voices calling to them, quietening them, commanding them: "Do not be afraid." For us, ordinary people faced with extraordinary threats, the words of the carol hold good:

"O hush your noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing".

The author is the Bishop of Southwark