For many of us shaped by immigrant families or marginalized communities, this Mary feels familiar. She looks like our abuelas—complicated, courageous, caught between survival and hope. Women who resist in their own quiet ways while also carrying the weight of harmful narratives they inherited. Women whose faith is not perfect, but persistent.

The invitation I’m offering in Liturgies for Resisting Empire is to identify those overarching themes of imperial thinking – like dominance and power, dualistic thinking, structures of hierarchy – that have taken root in all of us, to understand the history and processes of how they came to be, and to make intentional choices that act counter to that and lead us towards communal healing.

While our communities continue to be surveilled, detained, and disappeared, mothers still rise in resistance. Rizpah, like the madres and abuelitas of Argentina, reminds us that empire’s greatest fear is women who refuse to forget.

Even if not invested in war directly, much of our theology is steeped in violence. We hear it in Sunday school songs, see it in images of a triumphant Christ wielding a sword, and witness it in political leaders who stoke division with violent rhetoric.

The prophets offer us a glimpse of what could be, but visions are not guarantees. They demand something of us.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the story was never about the whale, but about a God who dares to ask us things we don’t yet know how to answer.