John Updike wrote a beautiful poem where he chides Christians who want to treat Jesus’ Death and Resurrection as a moral parable rather than as an actual historical fact (see below).  Sadly, too many theologians and spiritual writers in recent times have tried to domesticate the Resurrection: “It just means the cause of Jesus goes on; we are just going to bear his presence to the world; it means we remember him fondly; it means he has gone to God.”  The trouble with these statements is that the same could be said of any great and admired figure.  If that is all the Resurrection - and thus Christianity - means, then it falls apart.  The Resurrection is not something that happens to the disciples; it happens to Jesus.  God the Father raises Jesus from the dead, and Jesus shows Himself bodily present to His disciples after His death.  Jesus was not simply resuscitated, that is, returned to this world as He was before death; Jesus is transformed.  He has conquered death.  Jesus appeared bodily present to His disciples.  This reality took their breath away.  The Good News is first and foremost the fact that Jesus is bodily risen from the dead.  Everything else in the Christian life flows from this reality.  Because of His Resurrection, we see that Jesus has conquered sin and death.  If you take those things away, you take Christianity away.  The Resurrection is the corner-stone of Christian faith.  Christ is Risen!  Indeed, He is Risen!

David J. Conrad

Seven Stanzas for 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.

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-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 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.