Sometimes the world seems so full of violence and horror, of lives wickedly and pointlessly destroyed, that we despair. Faced with such fragility of life and the apparent randomness of evil, can we make any sense of it at all?

The immense tragedy of Dunblane drives us to pause, to stop and to be silent - a silence that is multifaceted. Deep anguish over the lives cut short. Deep sorrow for those suddenly and cruelly thrust into bereavement. Deep anger at the man who perpetrated this crime. Deep penitence that this was what our society had come to.

My own mind turned at once to that account in the Gospel of Matthew immediately following that of Our Lord's Nativity - the Massacre of the Innocents by a violent and vicious Herod with its precedent in the slaughter of the first-born by Pharaoh, King of Egypt.

The Bible is no stranger to tragedy, to the wicked and evil ways of humanity, to that evil which smoulders within and which once indulged is able to unleash forces so uncontrollable that they become inhuman, even `demonic'. The price of human freedom is ever the risk of wickedness and evil. Any murder is abhorrent, that of a child doubly so. A child is a symbol of hope, a fresh start, new possibilities, a life uncluttered by the failures and the wounds and the deep resentments we adults carry. It seems so cruelly unfair to extinguish such a source of light.

And a child by definition is vulnerable, dependent, has to trust. Infanticide, the ultimate human abuse of that vulnerability, shock us to the core.

The Massacre of the Innocents poses deep and searching questions, which defy any glib answer, which almost defy any response at all. They challenge faith to the roots: faith in God, faith in each other, faith in ourselves, faith in humanity.

How can you still believe in a loving and caring God if He allows such things to happen? Theologians down the ages have wrestled with such basic and fundamental questions, which lie at the very heart of our existence - the mystery of life and death, of good and evil, of tragedy and triumph.

Such evil as this exposes sharply the limitations of our self-understanding; it punctures the pride of our arrogant assurance and lays bare the raw frustration and helplessness which we experience.

Is there nothing at all that can be said, no word spoken, so that we are left in a vacuum of desolation and hopelessness?

The Christian faith speaks of God's Word spoken to us in Jesus Christ - the Word made flesh. It is, I believe, this enfleshed Word who Himself experiences the heartbreak and the dereliction and the agony in Gethsemane, echoed on the Cross as He helplessly cries out `My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?' to which apparently there is no response, no answer, only silence.

The Innocent is crucified, led as a lamb to the slaughter, done to death, and there is no rational explanation, only the fact that God so loves the world. It is only the mystery of the suffering and death of Jesus Christ, in the stark symbol of the Cross, that addresses the contradiction of the presence of evil in a world created and sustained by a living and loving God. God, who has seemed so distant, even absent, is actually Himself bearing the pain, within our grief and our sorrow.

More than that, even in this tragedy, He speaks to us of life through death, of the final victory over wickedness and evil, already accomplished in Jesus Christ, a sure sign of hope in a dark and troubled world.