Commentary: Bhutto assassination is reminder of darker side of Christmas story

It's easy to forget that the biblical stories of Christmas are not all peace and joy.

Wise men from the East come to pay homage to the newborn king. The ruling king, King Herod -- a puppet king of Caesar's empire -- sends the Wise Men to Bethlehem and asks that they return to him when they have found the child.

The Wise Men find the family lodging in a shelter, the baby lying in an animal's feed box. But after presenting their gifts, they do not return to Herod. They do not become Herod's spies. We're told they "return by another way."

According to the story, Herod is enraged. Enraged that the Wise Men refuse to become his deputies. And enraged by the threat an infant poses to his authority. He orders the death of all children younger than age 2.

Joseph and Mary flee to Egypt where the infant king, the "prince of peace," becomes a refugee from systemic violence. It's all there in the stories.

But it's easy to forget -- until gunshots ring out in Pakistan. Easy to forget -- until Benezir Bhutto dares to poke her head through the moon roof of a safe cocoon to wave to the crowd, and is gunned down.

The Christmas stories are not strangers to this violence. They tell us what we already know but don't want to accept -- that the way of Herod -- the way of power taken by violence, the way of deception and unreliable foreign intelligence -- has turned the planet into a very violent place.

It's a world where Herod's reign of terror persists among those that killed Ms. Bhutto and her supporters.

But it also persists here at home, where we make war instead of peace based on bad intelligence, use force instead of persuasion, use torture and military might instead of diplomacy and creative solutions. The rule of terror suborns the rule of love as much at home as it does in Pakistan.

It is this rule of violence on which the Wise Men turn their backs in the story. Strangely, we never hear from them again. For that reason they symbolize forever the wisdom to turn our backs on Herod's way and the slaughter of innocents -- the need to "return by another way."