Jitterbugging for Jesus

The late John Updike’s famous poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter” gets right to the heart of his belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ in the first few striking lines:

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.

Wow. Take that, you liberal, sophisticated churchy globs of molecule-and-amino-acids who want to take the reality out of the empty tomb.

Before I explore the great Easter poem further, I want to share some of Updike’s background with readers who may vaguely know the name John Updike, but know nothing about his amazing body of work.

I mentioned in yesterday’s posting about Karl Barth that Updike, the sophisticated, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for literature, was among Barth’s greatest admirers.

Known for some of his novels that explored sex in famously raw and graphic but non-gratuitous ways, Updike, who died in 2009 at age 76, was a devout Christian and regular churchgoer, Episcopalian Div. He wrote three great American novels about a regular American guy known (and lost soul) named Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Rabbit was a high school basketball star who peaked early and went downhill in life fast.

Updike wrote three popular novels about a lost soul, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, who peaked in high school as a hoops star and went downhill fast. We’ve all known those guys.

The influence of Karl Barth’s Christian theology is obvious in all 61 of Updike’s books, which included novels, short stories, poetry, essays and criticism, all of it sharply eloquent. Updike’s enthusiasms included golf (a sport he played and wrote eloquently about), literature, God, the church and Karl Barth and Barth’s theology, not necessarily in that order.

His “Seven Stanzas at Easter” challenges the church and its believers to let go of any shame or embarrassment we have about Christianity’s defining event.

Own your faith or take a nice Sunday hike, the poem says.

Updike suggests that if we reduce the whole thing to a metaphor or analogy and “sidestep the transcendence,” we mock God. The many implications of that are obvious, the fall of the church being one (and it’s falling fast).

And anyway, if we don’t believe what we purport to believe, why are we wasting so much of our limited lifetime practicing dreary old worn-out rituals and rites?

Why do we even pray in the name of a Jesus Christ who (seriously?) came back from the dead in an event that defies the correctives to miracles and superstitions and primitive thinking that we embraced with the Enlightenment and science so long time ago?

We could be playing golf on Sundays or drinking Bloody Marys at Brunch or taking our kids to soccer games on Sunday mornings, in Paul’s words, eating, drinking and being merry.

All of which, you may have noticed, we increasingly do, while we proclaim to be Christian because we are baptized and because we do church every Christmas and Easter, faithfully.

Updike, hardly one to buy into mindless, superstitious thought, challenged Christians with his typically gorgeous words to “walk through the open door” of the tomb and stand tall in the glowing light of church life with the resurrected Christ, without shame or embarrassment.

With these challenging words…

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.