“The Challenge of Easter”

Last updated on: March 27, 2016 at 12:34 am by Dan Peterson

“The Challenge of Easter” 2016-03-27T00:34:00-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Piero della Francesca, “The Resurrection of Jesus Christ” (ca. 1464)
Wikimedia Commons public domain

Father James Martin’s article on Easter in the Wall Street Journal is excellent — which, to a certain degree, means that I agree with it and that I could very well have written it myself:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-challenge-of-easter-1458916153

But I really do commend it to your attention.

And, continuing somewhat in the same vein as Father Martin’s article, I’d like to share one of my very favorite poems: “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” by John Updike:

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.

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