"Seven Stanzas at Easter" by John Updike

Ever now and then, a poem speaks to you. That's how I felt the first time I encountered John Updikes poem "Seven Stanzas at Easter". It's not my usual style of poetry; I tend to go for same number of syllables per line, rhyming, more Shakespeare and Donne than modern. But this hit home. 

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule 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-mache,
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 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.
-John Updike

What we believe is not reasonable. It is not polite, it is not pleasant. It is monstrous. But unless we believe the fullness of the monstrosity, that Christ rose with the same body, though transformed, that he died, the miracle is meaningless. If it was anything less than a weighty stone, a real angel, a real chemical body, it's just a story. A weird parable of an old religion. But if its true, then we have to admit to ourselves that God has no interest in playing to our convenience when our salvation is at stake.

This poem challenged me many years ago to face what I was confessing. Choose the physical, risen Christ of the empty tomb, or a metaphor that would make me seem a little less crazy.

I chose the former.

Happy Easter.