An Imperfect Messenger
The story [of Jonah] is glorious because it reveals unerringly a universal God of mercy and justice and because it pokes holes in the self-righteousness of those who think themselves religious while blaming others for the evil in the world and taking pleasure in their suffering.
—Megan McKenna, Prophets: Words of Fire
Father Richard Rohr has always felt a deep connection to the story of the prophet Jonah, while recognizing how imperfectly Jonah follows his call:
Even though I love Jonah, he is what I call an unfinished prophet. He rejects his divine commission at first, refusing to preach God’s mercy to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria and Israel’s ancient enemy. After he flees and boards a ship going the wrong way, he’s cast overboard in a storm, swallowed by a great fish, and rescued in a marvelous manner. Only then does he obey God’s call and go to Nineveh. The people repent upon hearing his message and thus are saved from God’s wrath. But Jonah complains, angry because the Lord spared them. He is so detached from his own real message that he’s disappointed when it succeeds!
From that point on, poor Jonah is simultaneously angry, lamenting, and praising YHWH for four full chapters. His problem is that he cannot move beyond a dualistic reward-punishment worldview. Jonah thinks only Israel deserves mercy, whereas God extends total mercy to Jonah, to the pagan Ninevites who persecuted Jonah’s people, and to those “who cannot tell their right hand from their left.” To make the story complete, this mercy is even given to “all the animals” (Jonah 4:11)! The world of predictable good guys and always-awful bad guys collapses into God’s unfathomable grace.
I love this story so much that I have collected images of a man in the belly of the whale for much of my adult life. I think I live in that whale’s belly permanently, with loads of unresolved questions and painful paradoxes in my life. Yet God is always “vomiting” me up in the right place—in the complete opposite direction that I’ve been trying to run, like Jonah himself (Jonah 2:10).
Jonah’s story breaks all the expectations of who is right and then remakes those expectations in favor of grace. It is a brilliant morality play, not a piece of dogmatic theology, as some try to make it. Yet it does have political implications, in the sense that it provokes us to change our notions of who deserves power and who doesn’t.
Jonah thought he had the exclusive cachet of truth and thus could despise those to whom he was preaching. He wanted them to be wrong so that he could be right, yet in his anger at Nineveh and the Assyrian Empire, he failed to appreciate God’s desire to offer forgiveness and grace even to Jonah’s enemies. In fact, he even resented their joining his “belief club.” He struggled mightily to accept the new “political” arrangement.
Have We Listened to God’s Call?
At the CAC’s CONSPIRE 2018 conference, Dr. Barbara Holmes (1943–2024) shared her own personal “Jonah story”:
There is a crisis of disobedience when we choose to disobey God’s will for our lives. In this instance, I think of Jonah…. He thinks he’s right. He hates the Assyrians, and understandably so. After all, they were a marauding, land-grabbing nation, a real threat to Israel. He had national pride. He wanted to see them destroyed. When he gets the call from God, he travels 2,500 miles to the southern area of Spain. He couldn’t get much further away. Why does he flee? He flees, he says at the end of chapter four, because he knows God is merciful. There is no worse situation than a merciful God when you want to see your enemies get what’s coming to them. Jonah wants to do things his way and ends up in the belly of a sea monster.
Do you have a Jonah story? I do. From the age of ten through my twenties, I knew I had a call of God on my life. Through dreams, waking visions, and moments of surprising attunement with the Divine, I knew God was calling me. But there I was, a ten-year-old girl, with a call to something I didn’t understand. I’d never seen a woman in ministry. For that matter, I’d never seen a woman leading in any spiritual capacity. So, what was I to do?
Well, I went on with my life. I got married, had two children, and after a decade heard the call again even more strongly. This time I turned my head to where I thought God lived (up there) and I said, “Excuse me, sir, or ma’am”—I wanted to cover my bases—“I don’t know if you know about the divorce, but I have two children, I’ve got to feed them and ministers don’t make any money. So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to law school.” [1]
It took time, but Holmes eventually said “yes” to God’s call. At CONSPIRE 2021, she encouraged listeners to remain open and faithful to God’s invitations to serve:
As I was standing at my law school graduation ceremony, I heard a voice say to me, “This isn’t it.” I was startled, and I said to my girlfriend who was standing in line with me to get our degrees, “I just heard a voice say, ‘This is not it.’” She started laughing and said, “Well, you sure have wasted a lot of time.”… There was nothing to do but hear the whispering and continue my practices. I now allow life to lead me to the precipice of the newness that was already seeded in my life….
Trust God, trust Holy Spirit to lead you into all truth. Make your intention clear that you will follow as called, without exception. Make your intention known to God and wait for the Holy Spirit to lead you into the fulfillment of your vocation. [2]
God Never Wanted Kings
The establishment of monarchy in ancient Israel was a theological disaster that God explicitly opposed—which should fundamentally challenge how we conceptualize divine authority today.
The establishment of monarchy in ancient Israel was a theological disaster that God explicitly opposed—which should fundamentally challenge how we conceptualize divine authority today.
First, let me start with something that’s always bothered me about 1 Samuel. As we talked about earlier, Eli’s sons are corrupt priests who steal from sacrifices and abuse their religious authority. God’s response? The entire lineage gets cut off. Divine judgment, full stop.
But fast forward a few chapters, and Samuel’s sons are taking bribes and perverting justice as judges. The consequence for Samuel? Absolutely nothing. The text never addresses this glaring double standard, never explains why one father faces devastating judgment while the other walks away unscathed.
Sometimes scripture’s inconsistencies are worth sitting with rather than explaining away.
But this smaller inconsistency points us toward a much larger theological tension. When Israel demands a king after Samuel’s sons fail, God’s response should shake any simplistic theology that claims everything happens according to divine plan. God explicitly tells Samuel: “They have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them” (1 Samuel 8:7). The people are literally rejecting God’s kingship in favor of human monarchy.
What follows in 1 Samuel 8 reads like dystopian political theory. God, through Samuel, lays out exactly what monarchy will mean. There’s a 4x repetition of the Hebrew verb יִקָּח/yiqqāḥ, “he will take” (which correlates with what Samuel’s own sons are doing, “taking bribes”). Samuel says, “Your sons conscripted for war and forced to run before royal chariots, your daughters taken as perfumers and cooks and bakers, your best fields and vineyards and olive orchards confiscated and given to royal officials. A tenth of your grain, your vineyards, your flocks—all flowing upward to sustain the machinery of monarchy.”
God essentially says, “You want hierarchical human power structures? Here’s your future.”
And they choose it anyway. Not everything happens according to divine plan.
Redactors
From a textual perspective, this is super interesting. The biblical editors who had to make decisions about what was included in the Bible—we call them redactors—had to make choices about what to include and what to leave out. These ancient editors were working during or after the monarchic period, when kings were simply a fact of life in Israel and Judah. Many of them, particularly those we call the Deuteronomistic historians, clearly favored David and worked to legitimize dynastic succession.
Yet they kept this blistering anti-monarchy critique right at the foundation of the monarchy narrative. They could have smoothed over this tension, could have edited the story to make monarchy look like God’s idea all along. Instead, they preserved this text that essentially says kings were never part of the plan. The Hebrew Bible’s ambivalence toward monarchy isn’t an accident or an oversight—it’s theological resistance preserved in canonical form.
This preservation of competing perspectives matters enormously for how we read scripture today. The Bible isn’t a monolithic document with a single perspective on power. It’s a collection of texts that argue with each other, that preserve minority reports and dissenting opinions. The same tradition that gives us royal psalms and Davidic covenant theology also maintains this fundamental critique that God never wanted human kings in the first place.
Jesus is…Lord?
Which brings us to contemporary theology and the language we use for the divine. Hebrew scholar Dr. Wil Gafney points out that even the word “Lord” in our prayer language emerges from slaveholding contexts. The Greek kyrios, the Latin dominus, the English “master”—these are terms from imperial and slaveholding societies. When we exclusively use imperial metaphors for the divine, we’re theologically legitimizing the very power structures that significant portions of scripture critique.
Think about how often our God-language relies on metaphors of domination: King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Sovereign, Ruler. We’ve so internalized these power metaphors that we rarely stop to ask whether they actually align with the God revealed in scripture—the God who warns against human kings, who sides with the oppressed, who shows up as a refugee baby rather than a conquering emperor.
The biblical editors understood something we sometimes forget: divine authority and human power structures are not synonymous. In fact, scripture often presents them as opposed to each other. The prophets consistently critique royal power. Jesus explicitly rejects the devil’s offer of all the kingdoms of the world. The early church proclaimed “Jesus is Lord” as a direct challenge to “Caesar is Lord,” not as an endorsement of lordship as a concept.
If scripture itself preserves skepticism toward concentrated power, then reimagining our God-language isn’t liberal revisionism or theological innovation. It’s fidelity to what the Bible itself does—preserving tension, maintaining critique, refusing to let power structures go unchallenged.
The God who warned against kings might not be thrilled with our imperial Christologies either.
Real theological imagination means finding language that sounds like liberation rather than domination. It means taking seriously scripture’s own skepticism about power rather than selectively reading only the texts that reinforce hierarchical authority. It means being honest about the ways our traditional God-language might actually work against the liberation that God desires for creation.
The ancient redactors left us a gift: a sacred text that argues with itself about power, that refuses to resolve the tension between divine sovereignty and human authority. Maybe it’s time we stopped trying to resolve that tension and started learning from it instead.
