Easter: I dont know what the hell happened

Seven Stanzas  for Easter
by John Updike

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.

I posted this poem by Updike on Easter Sunday, wanting mainly to put something up for Easter—then got lost in some very academic maunderings about the Biblical accounts of the resurrection. Later, it felt inauthentic—the truth is, I don’t know what the hell to think about the resurrection story—and I was probably in over my head anyway. So I deleted it.

But I’m re-posting the Updike poem—it’s a good one, regardless of the theology. I had wanted to post something about Updike on the anniversary of his death in January, but I failed to do it. I may still—he was a towering writer, and though I have read only one of his novels I admire him greatly. A friend of mine suggests, wisely, that the poem might in fact be arguing against Biblical literalism—that’s a keen insight because Updike is clearly expressing that the wish for literalism, for a “real angel” and the “vast rock of materiality,” is just that: a wish. Another wise friend of mine says only that Easter is evidence of the “appalling naivete of Christians.” She says: “one DOES die, one doesn't go on and on, looking down from Heaven, sitting at the right hand of whomever.”

Yes, possibly. Who knows? And no one can “know” any better what precisely happened, in an historical sense, on the third day after a Palestinian Jewish mystic itinerant preacher was murdered on a cross two thousand years ago. But my original posting was an attempt to assert that there is a way to read the resurrection stories without recourse to cartoon science fiction imagery of bodies floating up from graves, that may not even be about the “next life” but about a renewed birth of vitality in this one; not about certainty regarding the afterlife, but a new freedom to live fearlessly in the face of uncertainty, death and ambiguity.