from that lovely Anglican, John Updike:
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cell's dissolution did not reverse, the
molecules re-knit, the amino-acides 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, side-stepping 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, no 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 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.
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