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 paper-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, “Seven Stanzas at Easter”
(HT: Ross Douthat)
This poem is being quoted too often. It represents a fundamentaism of Updike in the early 1960s, a fundamental tinged by skepticism (IF the resurrection did not happen in a literalistic sense, IF there was not a real angel rolling back a real stone, then…) which he outgrew later. For his mature, critical view on the resurrection narratives you should read the novel “Roger’s Version”.
I have some remarks on Updike’s poem at http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/04/the_resurrectio.html
Dostoevsky had some strange ideas about resurrection, inspired by a pseudo-scientist called Fyodorov, whom Tolstoy, Solovyev and Berdyaev also befriended and admired: http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/04/dostoevsky-and-resurrection.html