John Updike was one of the great American novelists of the past half century and one of only three writers to ever receive two Pulitzer prizes during his lifetime for his work. A good deal of his writing returns frequently to distinctly Christian themes. His poem Seven Stanzas on Easter is one of my favorite pieces from Updike’s corpus. A more profound meditation on 1 Corinthians 15:14 would be hard to find: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (cf. all of 15:12-19). The bodily resurrection of Jesus is at the center of the Christian gospel. Without it, there is no Christianity. And no hope for the world. Ponder Updike’s lyrical exploration of this truth:
SEVEN STANZAS ON EASTER
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.