RCL Easter A
9 April 2023
Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral
New Westminster BC
In the early spring of 1960 a small Lutheran congregation in Martha’s Vineyard offered a $100 prize in a local poetry competition. The prise was won by a student from Harvard who wrote a poem entitled ‘Seven Stanzas for Easter’. He donated the prize money, with a little over $1000 in today’s dollars, to the congregation. His name was John Updike.
John Updike went on to become one of the significant American writers of the later decades of the twentieth century. In the view of some critics he ranks among the greatest American writers, while in the mind of other critics he was a voice of a conservative, uptight middle America. To this day he remains a widely read author as well as a much debated one. But his poem reveals a deep faith in the reality, the physicality of the resurrection, a faith he seems to have kept throughout his life.
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 times:
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. [1]
Ever since that first Easter some two thousand years ago Christians and our critics have struggled to explain what happened to transform a small group of frightened and for most part working-class, uneducated Palestinian Jews into a movement that would eventually include two billion people in more than 45,000 distinctive expressions of the good news of God in Christ. To some the resurrection is a spiritual experience, a mystical experience, an affirmation of our deepest hope that there is more to life than what we experience with our five senses.
To others the resurrection is a metaphor, a story told to re-assure us that evil is always overcome by good, that life is stronger than death, love stronger than hate, justice stronger than oppression. To some the resurrection is a story from a more naïve past when people lived in a world populated by gods, demi-gods and other mysterious beings.
All these ways of understanding the resurrection offer us a means of comprehending what is, honestly compels me to say, is incomprehensible, whether two thousand years ago or today. But these different ways, as well as all the other ways, do not describe what I believe to have happened on this morning outside Jerusalem.
I believe that God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead in the fullness of his humanity, in the fullness of the person that Mary Magdalene, Peter, John and all the other witnesses to the resurrection knew and loved and mourned and touched. There was, to be sure, something different about him, a quality of life that was, if you wish, other-worldly. But it was Jesus, the Jesus who taught and healed and suffered and died.
When we confess our faith in the resurrection, we are confessing our belief that matter matters, that God cares for the totality of what it means to be a human person – our bodies, our minds, our hearts, our souls, our memories, all that makes me me and you you. To believe in the resurrection of Jesus is to believe that what we see and touch and celebrate in creation is the result of God’s loving intention. The physical is not an accident but the result of God’s choice to make room for us in the kosmos.
Gretchen Ziegenhals writes that “ . . . if we believe in the resurrection of the body, we will respect all bodies here among us – Black, brown and white bodies; rich and poor; male, female, trans and nonbinary; straight and gay; friend and stranger; young and old.” [2]
While we wait for the resurrection – for our bodies and those of our loved ones to be ‘regathered’, as Updike describes – there is embodied work for us to do now, despite our pandemic limitations: the work of justice and equity; the work of feeding and housing; the work of sharing bread, employment and fellowship; the work of making room for other voices and bodies; the work of ministering to the sick and the lonely in whatever ways we can. [3]
When I was younger and regularly singing in my parish choir, I realized that there were hymns that I did not enjoy singing. The tunes were lovely, but the words did not express what it meant to be a disciple of Jesus who was raised by God from the dead. Many of these hymns were the hymns of people who were oppressed and who struggled in their day-to-day lives. They were filled with hope ‘in the sweet by and by, when we’ll meet at that beautiful shore’. But I didn’t hear hope; I heard resignation and acceptance of the world as it is rather than working tirelessly and fearlessly for the world as God desires it to become.
I have no certain knowledge of when creation will become what God desires it to become. In the meantime I trust that God holds all the faithful departed in anticipation of that day when God’s purposes are achieved. In the meantime I pray that “we, who share [Christ’s] body, [may live] his risen life; we, who drink his cup, bring life to others; we, whom the Spirit lights, give light to the world . . . so that we and all [God’s] children shall be free”. [4] Why? Because God raised Jesus from the dead, everything that made Jesus Jesus, and, in so doing, has shown us that matter matters to God and that we, everything that makes us us, matters to God, now and in the age to come.
[1] John Updike, ‘Seven Stanzas for Easter’ (1960).
[2] Gretchen E. Ziegenhals, ‘Walking through closed doors this Easter – the resurrection of the body’ https://faithandleadership.com/gretchen-e-ziegenhals-walking-through-closed-doors-easter-the-resurrection-the-body.
[3] Gretchen E. Ziegenhals, ‘Walking through closed doors this Easter – the resurrection of the body’ https://faithandleadership.com/gretchen-e-ziegenhals-walking-through-closed-doors-easter-the-resurrection-the-body.
[4] The Book of Alternative Services (1985), 214-215.
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