A Poem for Easter

Here is the poem I have kept coming back to during this Lenten season. This is John Updike's poem, "Seven Stanzas at Easter." I will avoid the temptation to perform a line-by-line analysis of the poem (you're welcome). In lieu of that, I will simply make some larger comments and mostly trust the poem to speak for itself. So, here it is.

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.

The subordinating conjunction "if" in line one might cause us to think that Updike is expressing doubt here about the reality of the resurrection. I don't think he is. I am basing that on the rest of the poem, which doesn't really strike me as doubtful in tone. After that, Updike focuses on the utter physicality of the resurrection, a physicality we can lose sight of all too often. This is a problem, I think, for any person or culture saturated in Christian imagery. We are so used to seeing mangers and crosses that the monstrosity of the incarnation and resurrection eludes us. Updike will have none of that. At the resurrection a real body was reanimated, molecules reknitted, amino acids rekindled, the strength of that pierced heart regathered. 

Updike wrote this poem when he was younger to be read during his church service at Easter. Considering this audience, it is clear that he is addressing believers here. Believers for whom, perhaps, the stark reality of the resurrection has turned into a cold fact, even a metaphor, as he says in the fourth stanza. I do this. I don't think I square with the reality of the faith very often. Not really. Not deeply. Every week I repeat the words of the creed and declare my belief in the hard physicality of the resurrection. Every night when I tuck my kids into bed I end our prayer telling our Lord that we long for his return and his eternal kingship over the earth. 

But I still miss it. I still twist it in order to suit my own sense of beauty. I still escape the event through transcendence, not through denial. I make it esoteric, spiritual, almost gnostic. And I avoid that rock hard reality of the "monstrous" nature of a man coming back from the dead.

Updike's warning in the final stanza alludes to Christ's eventual return. I was talking with one of my classes last week about end times' prophecy. They are not growing up in the heyday of Left Behind nonsense like I did, but they are growing up still with people trying to make everything apocalyptic. We talked, though, about how in the teachings of Jesus the whole point is that we don't know and can't know when this will happen. He tells us that he doesn't even know. His warnings are consistently that we be prepared at all times because we do not and cannot know. We must be vigilant, lest he returns and finds us unprepared. For Updike here, the concern is that those of us who considered ourselves faithful (another theme of Christ's) will ultimately be embarrassed when we realize how much we have short-sold the miracle at the center of our faith. 

This Easter my prayer is that the concrete reality of the event would not elude us. Let us, together, walk through the door.