We just heard from John’s gospel the story of Thomas, his initial disbelief and his ultimate profession of faith in the risen Christ: “My Lord and my God” (20:28).

Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman tells the story of another Thomas, Tomas Eriksson, pastor of a pair of Lutheran churches in the early 1960s.

All of the action in Winter Light, the film’s English title, takes place between 11 am and 3 pm on a cold, dark Sunday, between the end of a communion service at one church and the beginning of vespers in the other. Tomas’ world seems choked with disease and decay. He has the ‘flu. His congregations have dwindled away almost completely. The hand of Jesus on a crucifix is missing several fingers. Pastor Eriksson proves spectacularly unsuccessful in counseling a suicidal parishioner and then in breaking the bad news to the man’s wife and children. Instead of listening and offering hope, Tomas hurls back his own sense of God’s silence and absence.

Tomas’ wife has been dead for five years. And although he has been seeing Märta, the village school teacher, for some time, Tomas finds their relationship stale. Before he can bear to read a long letter from Märta, one in which she both acknowledges Tomas’ withdrawal and nevertheless offers again her love, herself, to him, Tomas pulls old photographs of his wife out of his wallet and lingers over them.

Bergman’s Tomas Eriksson loves death, spoiling life as he clings so tightly to dead things. And Bergman’s Tomas also hates death, yearning for life even as he recoils from living bodies. Tomas goes through the motions of life in a cave of self-pitying, self-protective, distance and isolation. He is unwilling to touch others, unable to be touched by them. Not a doubting Thomas; instead, a man bound in knots of pain and regret, hoarding his experiences of loss and suffering as fragile, private possessions. Waiting for the coroner to arrive, Tomas shows surprising curiosity concerning the body of the suicide victim; together with his lover in the schoolroom, he cruelly rejects Märta and what he calls “this maze of idiotic trivialities”: the altar flowers she arranges, her good advice, her nearsightedness, her fumbling hands, her periods, above all the bloody sores on her hands, feet, and forehead caused by a severe bout of eczema.

That’s Bergman’s story of Tomas Eriksson.

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The gospel stories of the appearances of the risen Christ share several common features: the followers of Jesus are sorrowful, dispirited, or afraid; Jesus appears, although they do not immediately recognize him as Jesus; Christ speaks or enacts a personal word of reassurance and empowerment allowing them to recognize him; and then they are set in motion by being given a task to accomplish. The first portion of today’s gospel lesson has most of these features (John 20:19-31). The disciples are hiding behind locked doors. Jesus appears in their midst, speaks peace, and breathes on them the Holy Spirit, like God the Creator breathing life into Adam, the man from the earth, or God the Redeemer granting new life to dead, dry bones in the valley seen by Ezekiel. The risen Christ commissions his followers to continue Jesus’ own God-given mission of forgiveness and reconciliation. Just one feature of the typical appearance story is missing – the non-recognition of the risen Christ. That becomes the point of the Thomas portion of our gospel lesson.

Thomas, John’s gospel tells us, was not with the other disciples when Jesus appeared to them and showed himself, wounded hands and side and all, to be alive on that first Easter Sunday. Can you imagine that like Bergman’s Tomas Eriksson, Thomas has a love/hate relationship with death? Perhaps something died in Thomas when Jesus was crucified. The other disciples huddle together behind locked doors in fear of an external threat. Perhaps it just hurts Thomas too much to see his companions, to be with them, to remember. And so Thomas keeps watch alone, in silence, behind the locked doors of his heart, clutching to himself his photographs, the shreds of his memories of Jesus, protecting himself from the meddlesome touch of other human beings.

Perhaps Thomas’ love/hate relationship with death goes back beyond Good Friday. For earlier in John’s gospel there is another mention of Thomas and Jesus and death. When Jesus announces to his disciples that dear friend Lazarus has died and that he, Jesus, is returning to Jerusalem despite the public plot of the authorities to capture and kill Jesus, Thomas says this remarkable thing: “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (11:16). Such deep attachment to Jesus, but skewed away from life and the raising of Lazarus toward death and an impotent gesture of self-destruction on Thomas’ part.

Although Thomas again takes his place among the disciples later in Easter week, he remains knotted up within himself and bound to death. He refuses to accept the other disciples’ testimony that God has brought Jesus forward through death to new life. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (20:25). Jesus appears again behind those locked doors, bestowing his peace upon the entire company, but addresses Thomas directly, intimately, lovingly. “Put your finger here…. Reach out your hand…. Do not doubt, but believe” (20:27). No longer clutching dead things to himself, Thomas makes the ultimate profession of faith, the one toward which the entire story line of John’s gospel has been moving: “My Lord and my God.” Christ Jesus, my Lord: the one I look to, obey, follow, serve. Christ Jesus, my God: the life, the light, the love that creates and redeems the world in tangible, personal form.

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Jesus has one more thing to say to Thomas in today’s gospel lesson. And in doing so, Jesus also turns in our direction. To Thomas: “Have you believed because you have seen me?” To us: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (20:29).

Our Easter faith this morning is less about our search for God, than God’s search for us. Our confession that Christ is risen celebrates God’s presence to us here in this world, in these bodies, not our escape from the body and transportation to God’s presence in some other world. The appearance stories in the gospels startle us with news of life rising from death, light shining in darkness, love melting hate. The story of believing Thomas invites us to remain in community, to fight the impulse to run away and hoard our feelings and experiences in lonely caves. Believing Thomas invites us to stop holding our breath against the all-encompassing Spirit of God. Believing Thomas invites us to open our eyes and extend our hands to incarnate life right in front of us.

If you listen very closely later this morning, you may hear one more whisper of believing Thomas. When Mother Melissa, our priest-presider, raises the bread after having repeated Jesus’ words – “Take, eat: This is my body …” – some in this assembly may engage in the old devotional practice of looking up at the raised loaf of bread, making the sign of the cross over themselves, and saying softly: “My Lord and My God,” Thomas’ words. “My Lord and my God”: a profession of faith in the presence of the risen Christ. When I engage in this practice, I have a sense of concentric circles radiating out from the bread in the priest-presider’s hands. This is my Body: the bread, yes. But more, wider; the entire assembly, the entire parish community in its life of prayer, fellowship, and service: This is my Body. Wider still: the entire world, the cosmos, all space and all time, this too is the Body of the risen Christ. “My Lord and my God.”

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Bergman’s film breaks off abruptly at 3 in the afternoon, the hour of Jesus’ death, as Tomas Eriksson begins vespers with the words: “Holy, Holy, Holy, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory.” Maybe Tomas is still just mechanically going through the motions of his deathly pantomime. Or maybe there is a glimmer of life and love reaching out to touch life and love. “Winter Light” never says which, unambiguously, for it remains a Good Friday piece, a Passion Play.

Because we find ourselves this morning with Thomas and the other disciples on the eighth day after Jesus’ resurrection, listen to the final three stanzas of Denise Levertov’s poem “St. Thomas Didymus [the Twin],” and allow her words to carry us to the body of the risen Christ:

And after the empty tomb
when they told me He lived, had spoken to Magdalen,
told me that though he had passed through the door like a ghost
He had breathed on them the breath of a living man—
even then when hope tried with a flutter of wings to lift me—
still, alone with myself, my heavy cry was the same:
Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.

I needed blood to tell me the truth,
the touch of blood.
Even my sight of the dark crust of it round the nailholes
didn’t thrust its meaning all the way through to that manifold knot in me
that willed to possess all knowledge,
refusing to loosen unless that insistence won the battle I fought with life.

But when my hand led by His hand’s firm clasp entered the unhealed wound,
my fingers encountering rib-bone and pulsing heat,
what I felt was not scalding pain, shame for my obstinate need,
but light, light streaming into me, over me,
filling the room as if I had lived till then in a cold cave,
and now coming forth for the first time,
the knot that bound me unravelling,
I witnessed all things quicken to color, to form,
my question not answered but given its part
in a vast unfolding design lit by a risen sun.

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