Seven Stanzas at Easter

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….

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….

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.

– from “Seven Stanzas at Easter” (1960), by John Updike (1932–2009)