Meanings of Christmas: There is no edification in this massacre of inno cence

The light of Christmas casts a shadow. One child was born but, as a direct consequence, many others were killed by Herod. Rowan Williams, Bishop of Monmouth, is impatient however with attempts to see significance in the suffering.

"O Almighty God, who . . . madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths . . . " I can't quite remember when I first realised that the Book of Common Prayer - which I love dearly - was capable of coming out with sonorous blasphemy; but I don't know what else you could call its Collect for today's commemoration of the Holy Innocents, the children massacred by King Herod in his attempt to eliminate the child Jesus.

God is not exactly being accused of engineering the deaths of these infants. But God is being represented as guilty of one of the most nauseating sins of our and other cultures: the sacrifice or suffering of children being colonised by some adult system of meaning and giving it a significance which makes it possible for us to contemplate it without horror.

It's the same phenomenon in Central Africa, in the armies of Laurent Kabila, or in the revolutionary guards of Iran and Iraq: children are conscripted into a bloody adult conflict, their pain somehow transfigured by an adult cause. Any offence against the integrity of the child is a kind of murder, subjugating the child to an alien principle or agenda: the abuser destroys children to glorify a particular kind of adult desire.

How does this basically differ from God turning a sickening massacre to edifying religious ends? The Book of Common Prayer rapidly escapes to the remote territory of metaphor, talking broadly about how we must mortify our vices and recover our innocence. This only makes things worse: the butchered child ends up as nothing more than a symbol for something else, for my moral problems.

A Christian at prayer ought to know better. One of the enormous and disturbing originalities of Jesus in the gospels is his insistent pointing to the child not as metaphor but as reality - even as instructor. Better not to be born than to offend against "one of these little ones". You want to know what it's like to live in the Kingdom of God? Look at a child. Jesus is not sentimentalising childhood innocence. He is rather saying that the child is in the most serious and irreducible way an Other to an adult. The child doesn't share an agenda, perhaps doesn't even share a language, with adults; the child is simply there, a human reality that is not involved in adult rivalries and negotiations.

What matters about the child is her or his presence and difference, all at once. The child should strip us of the assumption that our agenda is the natural, the obvious, the authoritative one. Only when this happens, says Jesus, do we get any inkling of what the Kingdom of God might mean. To bring the child into our framework and our priorities is to destroy that otherness and so destroy something of our own possibilities of new life.

And while it may be easy to shake our heads over Kabila or the Ayatollahs, it is less easy to talk of the routine ways in which we pressgang children into adult fantasies and projects here in Britain - whether by exploiting the pre-teen market, making sure that children are drawn in to the consumerist addiction as soon as possible, or by tolerating the social conditions that force the child into struggle and in some violent estate, or by the casual and knowing sexualising of the image of young girls by the beauty and fashion industry or just by the barbarous functionalism of so much of our educational rhetoric.

Jesus seems to say that the child must be left to be just that: an Other, whose importance for us adults is that they're not like us. And one consequence of this is that we have to resist the temptation to impose meanings on the sufferings of children; to let ourselves be nakedly shocked precisely because the pain that children experience doesn't let itself be used and processed into any of our systems.

No glorifying, then. I can't say the Book of Common Prayer Collect for today and I don't think anyone should. Perhaps confronted with the pain of the child is our only response should be to look - to shut up and look. And resist the temptation to try to make it tidy. Remember Dennis Potter's haunting remark, "Religion is the wound, not the bandage."