The Nazareth Page - A gospel meditation for your home
May 10, 2026 – Sixth Sunday of Easter - John 14:15-21
REFLECTION QUESTIONS:
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Today’s gospel offers a spiritual roadmap on how to connect with God. But instead of indicating how distant God is from us, it reverses the search to telling how close God is.
Regular readers of “The Nazareth Page” know that I have a deep interest in cosmology and astronomy. We live in a great age of discovery for mapping (or trying to understand) the full dimensions of our cosmos. I won’t offer here a lesson on all that we have learned from the amazing discoveries of our time, the most well-known being from the Hubble telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. To gaze ever outward is to look back in time as it takes time for the early light of the expanding galaxies and stars to reach us. Literally, we can see what constituted the universe in the first centuries of its existence.
When I was a youngster and first learning about God, I was simply told that God was in heaven. And if I inquired about the location of heaven, I was advised to look up. Heaven was in the sky. For a while that satisfied my spiritual curiosity. Years later I learned about outer space, first about the solar system, then our galaxy, the Milky Way. Eventually I learned about all the rest. (Which is a lot!) In a sense the location of God for me seemed more distant because God created the universe so God must in some sense be outside it.
As I became more familiar with the writing of those deeply immersed in spiritual matters, I found another way of thinking about God’s presence. One insight that helped me get closer to God was by dismissing the image that God is outside of creation and replacing it with the idea that creation can be thought of as inside God.
Add to this, a thought from todays’ gospel where Jesus states that he will continue to live with us along with God the Father and the Holy Spirit. So where is God? As close to us as we are to ourselves. This is spiritual language full on. It’s deeper than appearances or physical reality. Even deeper than interpersonal reality where those close to us are thought of as near although they may be geographically distant.
Another hurdle we have to overcome is not thinking of God as if God were part of the physical universe. Again, stretching language some, we are correct in saying that God is immediately present and God is everywhere we might go. Again, referring to today’s gospel, we are never alone or distanced from God. We may feel closer to God in certain locales or situations, which is human. The greeting used at Mass, “God be with you” is to invite awareness of God between us. It affirms that God is already there!
David M. Thomas, PhD