What do you do when someone hands you a box full of God?
I mean this quite literally. Imagine you arrive at church one Sunday, and instead of the usual ritual choreography, a priest walks up to the altar holding a cardboard box – the kind you use for moving house – and announces, perfectly seriously: “The Creator of the universe is in here.”
Would you believe him?
I’d suspect a trap.
And yet, every time I walk into a church, I genuflect at the tabernacle – which is, when you strip away the gold leaf and the red sanctuary lamp, simply a box. A beautifully dressed box. A box we have agreed to treat differently. But a box nonetheless.
And the question that has never quite left me is this: what in me knows the difference?
Does anything in me know the difference?
If I’m being honest, there are days when I would love to walk right up to that gilded box, knock twice, and ask: “Is anyone home?“
That’s why Thomas makes so much sense to me.
He wasn’t there the first time. We don’t know why – whether he was still hiding somewhere, whether grief had driven him into solitude, whether he simply couldn’t bear to be in that locked room with everyone else’s terror pressing in from the walls. What we do know is that he came back. He returned to the same people, the same locked room, the same sealed-off world – and he heard something that didn’t match what his eyes were seeing.
We saw the Lord. He came. He breathed on us.
Look at that room with Thomas. Look at those faces. These are people still wrapped in fear, still behind bolted doors a week later. And you’re telling me the Risen Lord passed through these walls, stood among you, and breathed on you – and this is what it produced?
I want to stand right next to Thomas and say: I’m with you. Keep asking. Keep looking. Because the God of the Shema – the God whose first command is Shema, listen, not look away, not stop your senses, not swallow it down without tasting – that God does not ask us to abandon what we know in order to believe what we’re told.
He asks us to hear more carefully.
What do you mean – he breathed on you?
That question is not doubt. That question is an invitation. Not to see more clearly, but to imagine through your ears. To re-enter the room. To feel what it might feel like to be standing there when someone exhales – not just air, but Spirit, Ruah, the original breath that moved over the waters before the first Word was spoken.
Breath before Word. That’s where we are.
Which is also where we were in the beginning.
Not in a sealed room, but in a garden, in another early morning, when there were steps. The sound of God walking in the cool of the day. And two people – hearing those steps – dove behind the bushes. They heard, and they hid. They had learned to be afraid of what they used to love.
The Resurrection is the invitation to come out from behind the bushes.
Not because everything is fine. Not because the question has been answered. But because the One whose steps you hear is coming specifically toward the place where you are hiding. And the charge he gives the gathered ones – whose sins you forgive are forgiven, whose sins you hold are held – is not a legal commission. It is a new Genesis. A community given the breath of life and sent out to do what God did in the garden: to speak into the hidden places, to call things by name, to make space where there was only sealed emptiness.
The locked room becomes something else now. Not a hiding place. A womb.
Which brings me back to the box.
The tabernacle matters. I don’t say any of this to dismiss it. But if I sense the Resurrection rightly, then the first tabernacle – the first place the living God chose to dwell after Easter – was not gold and red lamp. It was a room full of frightened, grieving, bewildered human beings who had just been breathed on.
We are the box.
You, gathering this Sunday with the particular weight you are carrying – the week-long exhaustion, the questions that didn’t resolve, the sense of belonging nowhere quite fully – you are the first icon of God that the person sitting next to you may ever encounter. Not a secondary icon. Not a backup plan while they figure out the real thing. The first and sometimes the only one.
So the question Thomas’s story leaves me with is not do I believe enough? It is something more like: am I attuned enough? Am I listening carefully enough to hear the breath just before the Word? Am I the kind of person – the kind of community – where someone who missed the first gathering, who arrived late and empty-handed and full of honest questions, might walk in and find the door already opening from the inside?
Because here is what I believe happened to Thomas: he came. Battered and unresolved and ready to ask his questions out loud rather than hide them behind a bush – he came back to the community. And Jesus came back for him specifically. Came through locked doors again, one week later, just for the one who wasn’t there the first time.
Jesus looks for the ones who didn’t make it to the first gathering.
Wherever your sealed room is – whatever walls you’ve been behind this week – he is already on the way there. And when you finally arrive, hand raised to knock, asking in your most honest voice is anyone home —
you will find God already running toward you from a distance, arms open, before your knuckles reach the door.
What kind of church do you want to be this Sunday? The kind where the ornament is the point – or the kind where a stranger walks in and can touch the body of Christ through the quality of your welcome?
Thomas got his answer because he came back to the community and dared to speak his question out loud. The gift of Easter is that the community is now the answer.
