Leave it to John Updike to teach us something
true about flesh — and the limits of his craft. In Seven Stanzas at
Easter, he nearly leaves writing altogether to mount the pulpit and
declare Jesus Christ's victory over death.
He need only
lose a conditional here and there ("if he rose at all"), make a
subjunctive or two indicative and he'd have a sermon that delivers
Christ's resurrection to the ones who need it most — the dead.
The
only shame here lies not with limited poets but with timid preachers
who, by commission or omission, preach against the Resurrection. So
it's left to a poet to end our farce: "Let us not mock God with
metaphor, analogy ... making of the event a parable, a sign painted in
the faded credulity of earlier ages ...."
An old German saying
goes: "[A thing] happened so long ago it isn't even true any more."
Apparently that's how we regard the Resurrection. We call it a "symbol"
that stands for another truth or a story with a moral. Sometimes we say
we don't know what happened on the third day, but it certainly inspired
certain Jews — what Updike calls "sidestepping, transcendence."
But
sharing such a spirit is not the Holy Spirit. That was Updike's fear —
a spirit abstracted from the flesh makes spirit a mere idea.
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