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.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage (Convergent, 2025), 85–87.
Image credit and inspiration: Jong Marshes, untitled (detail), 2017, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Beneath the surface we flail, bewildered. Has our heart grown too hard to sense the gentle sun of God’s mercy drawing us up and out?
Story from Our Community:
Something is in the air. The climate is changing. The storms are more intense, but the skies are more beautiful. Trees are dying and yet flowers are blooming that I’ve never seen. Has nature changed or is it just my eyes? Even a glass of water looks beautiful. My friends are changing. They protest, but not so much in anger. They are simply saying, “This is not love.”
—Cindy G.
