Thoughts From John Updike

Dear Friends,

In light of our celebration of the glorious event of the Resurrection of Jesus this past Sunday, I pass along to you my FAVORITE Easter poem. It was written by the well-known author John Updike, who after graduating from Harvard University in 1954, began attending a Lutheran church in Marblehead, Massachusetts — a church similar in many ways to the Lutheran church he attended in his youth in Shillington, Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of Reading.
 

When the church in Marblehead sponsored a Religious Arts Festival in 1960 and offered a $100 prize for the best artwork, Updike submitted the following poem entitled, “The Seven Stanzas at Easter.” He won the contest, received the $100, and promptly gave it back to the church. The poem is as follows. I trust you might enjoy it as much as I have.

“Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
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-mâché,
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 and vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light,
and 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.”

In response to questions about his faith, Updike said, “I have been a churchgoer in three Protestant denominations—Lutheran, Congregational, Episcopalian—and the Christian faith has given me comfort in my life and, I would like to think, courage in my work. For it tells us that truth is holy, and truth-telling a noble and useful profession; that the reality around us is created and worth celebrating; and that men and women are both radically imperfect and radically valuable."

No one (including himself) would suggest his life was blameless. He confessed he was a flawed person in need of mercy. In his autobiographical poem ‘Midpoint,’ Updike transparently admits his (and everyone else’s) desperate need for divine grace, quoting Karl Barth’s assertion that, “a drowning man cannot pull himself out by his own hair.” Who could disagree? In fact, in an interview about the poem, Updike said that he believed Barth meant, “there is no help from within. Without the supernatural, the natural is a pit of horror. I believe that all problems are basically insoluble, and faith is a leap out of despair.”

As far as this Easter resurrection poem, written at the height of the modernist age (the most anti-supernatural period in American history, where science was hailed as king and most all references to the miraculous were considered suspect, or an open admission of academic ignorance) many pastors, clerics, and church members were explaining away the supernatural elements of Christianity, including the possibility of resurrection. This poem, then, is John Updike chastising churches for their lack of courage and their attempts to reduce the resurrection to something natural, explainable, metaphorical, or merely symbolic – something easier for the modern mind to believe.

He saw his poem as an opportunity to convince people in a scientific age that as fanciful as such miracles might seem to the “educated,” the resurrection of Jesus' physical body DID occur. The molecules did reknit, the amino acids did rekindle, and the resurrected Jesus WAS given, “in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye” (says Paul in I Cor. 15) an immortal, eternal, and imperishable body. In his resurrected state he did have, “hinged thumbs and toes,” as well as “a valved heart.” Ghosts can’t be touched and don’t eat fish, as Luke 24:39 and 42 reminds us!

If all this is not the case, suggests Updike, “the church will fall.” A statement which I believe is as true today as it was on the day he penned it in 1960.

In the Bonds of Gospel Faith, Pastor Jeff