With all the understandable shock, grief, pain and anger many of us feel as a result of Tuesday's terrible events, how should we react? What should we do?

The bracelets that many young Christians have been wearing over the past couple of years may provide a useful clue.

WWJD? - What would Jesus do? - they ask themselves. And they ask us to consider as well: What would Jesus do?

To answer that question, we might ask another. What kind of person was Jesus?

He was clearly a compassionate man who keenly felt the human pain and controversies of his own times, no matter what else you believe about him. He knew the yoke of Roman oppression. He was a Jew, an Israelite born in a manger, Scripture tells us, because his parents had to go to Bethlehem to pay the tax collectors of the occupying government.

Respected Bible scholars have said that Jesus probably grew up in Nazareth as an outcast because of his apparently humble origins. We are told that he was a landless peasant in a society that placed a high value on land.

So we might speculate that Jesus the Jewish peasant was in some obvious ways very much like the Palestinians of today. A majority of those who live in Palestine today are the Muslims and Christians whose ancestral homes and properties were expropriated by the British colonial regime that divided ancient Palestine into the states of Israel and Jordan, enforcing a partition based on ethnicity, but also on religious belief. But each of the faiths represented in that partition shared many values, and among them are certain expectations about human behaviors, about fairness and justice.

The words attributed to Jesus about justice are relatively few, but their impact has been lasting. Perhaps the most memorable saying is what we call the golden rule. Of course, the elemental truth of the so-called golden rule existed long before Jesus, but, thanks to the influence of Christianity, its essential power has been even more widespread: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

It is clear that those who use violence to make political statements, especially terrorist attacks on the innocent, do not feel the restraint implied by the golden rule. The escalation of this kind of violence in acts of vengeance and retribution is likewise not condoned or accepted by the faithful of any healthy religious institution, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or another.

But we who accept this simple statement as being the foundation of our faiths must pause and ask ourselves anew each time that we feel assaulted or threatened: What would Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed the Prophet do? What would be the right thing to do?

Our political and governmental leaders could do much worse than to consider this simple maxim as they take care to make overtures, to build alliances, to engage in constructive dialogue, to make adjustments and concessions and demands, before launching the terrible might of the world's remaining superpower against individual or national targets anywhere.

I believe the great rabbi of Galilee would ask no more, and certainly no less, of us.

The Rev. Dan King is pastor of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Augusta.