Seven Stanzas at Easter

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