I work as the Chaplain of the Church Center for the United Nations and am intrigued with Marta Benavides' expression "I don't want to die for the revolution; I want to LIVE the revolution". It's very provocative given the text I'm working on from the book of John. In that book, Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd who dies for his sheep. He's not the hired hand. He's the shepherd who loves his sheep so much that he will die for them. I know this ideology like the back of my hand. Our whole country and its aggressive military, its ability to be a colonial power, its sense of patriotism and its religious underpinnings are part of this ideology.

I know that Marta has taken alot of criticism because when the Civil War hit in the 80s in El Salvador and her friend and mentor, ArchBishop Oscar Romero was shot and killed, she had an all out argument with her God. Her conversation went like this: "I don't want to die! I want to LIVE. I am in this revolution because I want to LIVE and I want others to LIVE; this is ridiculous this killing and being killed; this martyrdom . . ..this possibility of rape, torture . . all these things . . .I do not believe that you want me to die . . . You gave me life. I believe you want me to live ." She then fled the country, came to the U.S. and lived outside the land and the people she loved for the next 10 years until the Peace Accords were signed in 1991. She chose in that time to work in other areas in Central America and the U.S. developing an agenda for peacemaking for the time when the war would end. It was immediately following her return to El Salvador that I met her as part of a seminary experience in 1991. And I watched her deep commitment to transform the horrid things that war had done to her people into places of beauty and prolific life over the next 18 years.

What is Jesus really saying? Untainted from years and years of traditional paintings, stained glass windows of buccolic Jesus' with sheep over his shoulders . ...or a country whose ideology of sacrificial death is so ingrained and necessary for its political and economic strength, is Jesus really saying the best thing we can do is die for our love? Is that the most loving of actions?

Sometimes its harder to live in a way that does not contribute to the deathly powers of this world. Sometimes its harder to live with a deep and conscious commitment to life. Sometimes its harder to day by day contribute to creating, hoping, loving rather than fall prey to the consequences of this unjust greed systems from which some of us have benefitted and many have not. . . .Sometimes its harder to live than to give in to a spiritual, emotional, psychological, or physical death of a system which values martyrdom.

I find this sculpture in this picture hilarious. It's from El Salvador. There's Jesus all bored with his scarred knees, and an ambivalent crown -- is it a halo or is it thorns? . . . . . .