This is a great question from one of our readers!
According to the Gospel of Luke, on the night Jesus is born, an angel appears to a group of shepherds to tell them the good news about the new baby. Then a whole group of angels suddenly appear, and they all start singing praises to God, saying, “Glory to God in the highest!”
But what does that mean? Did the angels mean that God lives at the highest point in the world? Is God’s house millions of miles above Earth, far out in outer space? If God is in the highest place we can imagine, does that mean that nobody is up there with God? The highest place seems like a lonely place; nobody is there to share it with you.
Before we can answer the question about what it means for God to be so high, we need to think about all the other questions that we might be overlooking. Sometimes when we ask one question, there are actually a lot of other questions hiding inside—like a Russian nesting doll (what my Russian godmother calls a Matryoshka). At first, a Matryoshka looks like one big wooden doll. But if you twist the top half off, then another smaller doll is inside. There’s another smaller doll inside that one. And on and on and on: What you thought was just one doll actually ends up being seven or eight.
Our questions about God are like these dolls. Each question leads to another.
Where is God to be found? This is a question that many of us ask during difficult times. When a grandparent dies or our friend gets sick and has to go to the hospital, we wonder where God is.
Oftentimes, when people ask where God is, what they mean is: “God doesn’t seem to be here when I need God most.” During these times, it can feel like maybe the angels were right and God is in “the highest.” Maybe God is so high up that God is too far away to do anything to help us.
But what we sometimes forget is that “God in the highest” is a metaphorical way of talking. God isn’t actually “up there” or “out there.” It’s just one way of understanding how we relate to God—we believe that God is a person, and people are located somewhere, so we think about a personal God in a similar way.
A metaphor helps us understand something by talking about something else. So, for example, if I say that my nephew Bennett lights up my life, I am not calling him the sun. I’m just saying that like the sun, Bennett adds warmth to my life. In those times when I am feeling gray, Bennett has a way of brightening up everything. I’m talking about Bennett in terms of something else.
The Bible uses lots of metaphors to shows us that God can be found all over—not just “in the highest.” Some of these metaphors are obvious: God is a rock, an eagle, a flame. We know that God isn’t actually any of these things, but these images can help us think about what God is like and how God relates to us. Like a rock, God is firm in God’s love for us. And like a fire, God can keep us warm on a snowy night. Metaphors help us make sense of the world.
But sometimes the metaphors can be so good at what they’re doing that they make us forget they are metaphors. If we started to think that God was actually a rock, then that metaphor would no longer be helpful. God is not actually a rock. The trick is to use metaphors about God but to always remember that they are metaphors.
So is the metaphor of God “in the highest” still helpful? Back when the Bible was written, people thought that there were levels to the world like a cake that has alternating chocolate and strawberry layers. At the bottom of the world was hell, just above that was Earth, and highest of all was heaven. Corresponding to these layers were different beings: demons were down below, humans and animals were in Earth, and angels and God were “in the highest.”
For people who had this worldview, it made sense to think of God as living in a very high place. It was a way of saying that God was the most powerful and deserving of the most praise. It was also a way of saying that God was in control of everything, because God could see everything that was happening, sort of like how you might look down on a board game to be able to move all the pieces where you want to.
Today, though, we think of the world and our place in it very differently. And, in a time when many people feel that God is too distant from us, too far away from what’s happening in our lives, maybe the metaphor of a “God in the highest” is no longer helpful. Maybe it’s time to look for other ways to think about God. We can find one of these ways in the same story of Jesus’ birth.
Before the angels show up to the shepherds, one angel appears to Mary and tells her to name her new baby Jesus. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church points out, the name Jesus means “God saves.” In other words, God is not first and foremost in the highest or up there or out there, somewhere separate from humanity. God is with Jesus. Where Jesus helps and saves people, God helps and saves people. Where Jesus heals and loves people, God heals and loves people.
This shifts our thinking. Instead of thinking about God in terms of place and where God might be, we can think about God in terms of activity. God is where God acts. We can understand God in terms of what God does. Some of the Bible writers do this, too, which is why the person who wrote the First Epistle of John says that “God is love.” God is what God does: God loves so God is love.
This way of thinking about God is present in the Hebrew Bible, too. Psalm 139 sings about how it’s impossible to get away from God, because God is everywhere. God is in heaven, says the psalm, and even in hell. That’s a tricky thing to think about, but it means that God is with us in the best places and in the worst ones. It’s impossible to hide from God, even when we feel like God isn’t where we are.
So where is God? God is where love happens. Love happens where the baby Jesus cries and smiles and his parents feed and play with him. Love happens when the adult Jesus makes silly faces and shares his food with people who are hungry. Love happens when you and I imitate Jesus and care for the people he care for. Love happens when we gather together in Jesus’ name and carry on his ministry, and when we become what the church calls the “body of Christ.”
God is where God happens, and God happens wherever we love.
Does this mean that we should stop thinking about God in the highest? No! If God happens everywhere, then God certainly happens in the highest, and it’s helpful to remember that sometimes. Think of it this way: Do you have a favorite star? Maybe you can look out your bedroom window as you fall asleep and see it up there blinking and smiling, far, far above your messy bedroom, above all the homework you need to do, above the fights you get in with your siblings. It’s nice to think about how that star isn’t weighed down by the world’s problems. I think it’s also nice to think about God this way—while God is with us in our problems, and knows all about them, God is still capable of rising above our problems.
So keep singing “Glory to God in the highest”: It’s a comforting thought. But just keep in mind that like all our talk about God, it’s metaphorical. We should continue using metaphors that help our relationship with God, but we should keep an eye out for when those metaphors stop being as helpful as they once were.
This essay is part of the new column Childish by Brandon Ambrosino, which aims to bring kids into theological conversations. You can read more of Brandon’s columns here.
Image: Unsplash/Dominik Schröder
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