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.

N.T. Wright

N.T. Wright is an interesting figure in contemporary Christianity. His books are bestsellers across the conservative-liberal ideological divide, and he infuriates people on both sides of that unfortunate aisle. He first came to my attention when John Piper, beloved prophet of we modern Calvinists, took aim at Wright’s theory on justification. In essence, they wrote books to each other each staking out his own position. Given my deep appreciation for Piper and his work, I was naturally skeptical of Wright and would have blithely dismissed him were it not for the encouragement of one of my good friends to give him a try.

Wright is a one-time Anglican bishop. (He recently stepped down to focus more on writing, speaking, and teaching) He is one of the most prominent voices in the old mainline faiths and, like his good friend the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, routinely makes enemies in all quarters--he is neither liberal enough for the full progressivists nor conservative enough for the staunch traditionalists. Wright is also one of the foremost Bible scholars in the world today, having taught for over 20 years at Oxford, McGill, and Cambridge. I recently read two of Dr. Wright’s books--Simply Christian and Surprised by Hope--and while I certainly found things to disagree with, moreso I found him to be a wonderful voice speaking the truth of the Christian gospel, mission, the purpose of the church, and the purpose of the individual Christian. Simply Christian is a sort-of modern Mere Christianity, with Wright asserting the basic doctrines of Biblical Christianity held across all theological traditions while framing the old story under an aesthetic designed to appeal to the educated, much like Lewis’s rather difficult and similar book. In many ways Wright reminds me of that other Anglican whose books have provided me with so much over the years, C.S. Lewis. I cannot say that I agree with all of Lewis’s theology, or even methodology, but he is a believer in the gospel, a compelling voice standing against the tide of universalism or liberalism or even reactionary conservatism, and has so much that is so good that I can read his books with discernment and be incredibly blessed by them.

In the next post I will review the second of Wright’s books that I have read, Surprised by Hope, but for now I want to come out in defense of the all too easily dismissed bishop. When you consider the milieu in which Wright works, his defense of the traditional Christian doctrines of creation, fall, redemption, resurrection, and the setting to rights of the universe in the coming of the new heaven and the new earth he looks extraordinarily faithful and countercultural. Now one could bemoan this as further evidence of the failure of the mainline denominations--that a man holding to basic doctrine is held up as a model of doctrinal purity--but let us be more generous than that to Wright’s endeavors and humble enough to face that whatever evangelical non-denomination we see ourselves as part of was only made possible by the extraordinary sacrifices of those easily maligned mainline churches. William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury (highest position in the Anglican church) was not ordained until he made up his mind that Jesus rose from the dead. David Jenkins, one of Wright’s predecessors at Durham, referred to the resurrection as a matter of conjuring tricks on the part of the disciples. Jenkins and John Dominic Crossan, another of the more renowned contemporary Bible scholars made famous for co-founding the Jesus Seminar, hold to what is called the moral objection of the resurrection: that Jesus was raised from the dead is all very well and good for him, but since God doesn’t intervene to stop hurricanes and earthquakes like he did to raise Jesus from the dead than what is the point of the resurrection?

Given this backdrop, my appreciation for Wright is immense and grows every time I consider it. Preaching what Wright preaches would not be difficult in a Southern Baptist church in Alabama. In fact, if he didn’t come off a little more conservative he would be booted from a job preaching there. But holding to a literal death and literal resurrection and literal salvation and real eternity is not easy in the Anglican communion. The institutional pressure before Wright and Rowan Williams became more prominent was to slide further into liberalism.  Wright and Williams are both working to arrest that slide. May God bless them as they try and may we not judge Wright according to our own supposed doctrinal purity. Let the mere in mere Christianity and, for Wright, the simple in simply Christian outweigh our own pet concerns.