Religion & Law

This poem, by John Updike, is probably known to the rest of you . . . but it was new to me.  Very powerful:

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 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 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.

- John Updike

I'm reminded of Flannery O'Connor's great line:  "If it's just a symbol, to hell with it."