Like, More Victorious-er

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

It’s Holy Week, and thus the Is the Resurrection literal or figurative, and does it matter? debate always makes its way into a couple of articles. So when Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry sent the following series of tweets, we found ourselves agreeing:

 

 

Yes, we are saying. We imagine that God is interested in the “more victorious-er” and even the “most victorious-er.” In addition, this recalls to mind the poem Seven Stanzas at Easter by John Updike. We will never grow tired of this Easter reading, and we’ve included it below:

 

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 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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