Other than this poem about Easter, I don’t know much else of John Updike’s poetry – and I haven’t read his novels either. This poem came onto my horizon a year or two ago and I was immediately attracted by its robust impatience with any softening of the scandal of the resurrection. The poem proceeds on the assumption that Paul wan’t kidding – if Christ hasn’t been raised the church is wasting its time, and is largely a waste of space in an already crowded world.
To read this poem, alongside 1 Corinthians 15, and after reading one of the Gospel resurrection narratives, is an exercise in theological clarity and historical particularity. Christ is risen – was dead and is alive – death is defeated – graves are robbed by grace – if Christ be not risen we are of all people the most miserable. But He is risen – risen indeed – so today is a day of rejoicing and feasting, of loving and hoping, of celebrating life and affirming the persistent creativity and plenitude of God’s love – nowhere more evident than in the incarnation, ministry, death, resurrection and living eternal reality of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.
Seven Stanzas at Easter
John Updike (1932)
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours..
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose..
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door..
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
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