| By John Updike 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-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. | 
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