Resurrection Matters
Thoughts on Updike's "Seven Stanzas at Easter"
Dear friends,
Every Easter on social media I share John Updike’s stunning poem, “Seven Stanzas at Easter.” This year, I thought I’d write some reflections on it as well and send them along to you. Those who’ve never read the poem are in for a treat. For those who have, I hope my thoughts provide some added value. And to all, I wish you a blessed Resurrection Sunday.
Updike’s Relentless Realism
I first became familiar with the work of John Updike as many college students do—through his oft-anthologized short story, “A & P.” It’s a relatable coming-of-age tale written in 1961 that also manages to capture the atmosphere of that tumultuous decade and the generational clashes at the heart of the social and cultural upheaval to come. Yes, the teenage narrator is immature and rather randy. No, he doesn’t hold women in high regard. And it’s true he is quite naïve about the ways of the world. But through these elements Updike is able to make a profound, and arguably rather sympathetic, comment about heroism and the dangers of self-deception.
Beyond the faults of the protagonist, there’s a sweetness to “A & P,” a sweetness I expected when I next encountered Updike in a grad seminar. Turns out that sweetness had more to do with the character and subject matter than with Updike’s signature style. The book was Rabbit Redux, the second of his highly acclaimed “Rabbit” series. Sweet it is not. Far from it. Stubbornly realistic, Rabbit Redux chronicles the unease of modern man unmoored from domestic attachments and responsibilities.
Despite Updike’s free use of vulgar language and graphic imagery, I have come to see, the author is quite traditional—leveraging the turmoil resultant from his protagonist’s selfishness, pride, and strife as a counter-apologetic for devotion, self sacrifice, and humility. The Rabbit books testify to Updike’s familiarity with what sin has wrought and implicitly stoke the desire for a world redeemed, a desire resonant with Updike’s own Christian faith. The realism of such presentation, however, can easily discomfit us. We tend to want our Christianity more palatably presented.
A Visceral Gospel
In “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” Updike forcefully and directly pushes back against such sentimentalizing. The physical fact of Jesus’ resurrection is foregrounded, with all the corporeality that it entails. The imagery is striking from the outset and, combined with the speaker’s authoritative tone, creates a scene readers can hardly ignore:
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.
The use of modern scientific terminology to describe the resurrection process challenges contemporary notions of a sacred/secular divide, with religion as the realm of faith and science the realm of physicality. No, Updike’s speaker asserts, these realities—spiritual and material—are not rightly pitted against one another. They intertwine, the divine acting in and through the concrete.
As manifested powerfully in the resurrection, the eternal renews, recreates, and redeems the tangible effects of death wrought by sin. To quote my friend and New Testament scholar Chris Kugler, “Christians believe in resurrection, not simply the post-mortem salvation of souls. It is not that death is simply redefined. It is overcome, and it turns back on itself.”1
Updike’s poem defamiliarizes this action, helping us better grasp the wondrous difference it makes in the here and now. He also impresses upon readers the importance of affirming that difference, aligning themselves with that truth. To do otherwise would be to betray the linchpin of our faith:
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 resurrection is a fact, true enough, but Updike wants us to appreciate that fact, to allow it to inform our own lives even now rather than to wait for some liberation far-removed. For we share with Christ the “same hinged thumbs and toes,” the “same valved heart,” and we face the same “vast rock of materiality” that in the grind of time will eventually blot out our own “wide light of day.” We, too, will die.
But death, Updike’s poem reminds us, no longer has the final word. There is life—actual and material uncorrupted life—beyond death, underwritten by Christ’s physical death and physical resurrection. That promise is no Pollyannaish wish, but a real hope backed by a real event. Updike of course did not conjure this notion. He’s tracking Christian tradition and recapitulating verses like I Corinthians 15:17.2
The Church’s Resurrection Mandate
Even still, Updike re-presents this truth for a post World War II world, a world where mass murder and widespread destruction might suggest faith is mere mythology or psychological indulgence. In the wake of so much atrocity, one is tempted to think salvation lies in some distant realm, that it has no bearing on our everyday existence.
Except that if the resurrection really and truly happened, it does indeed change everything. Death, on large and small scales, no longer holds all the cards. And that truth should make a difference in our own lives and daily practice. Updike’s clever formal parallel linking His body in the opening stanza with the Church reminds us that Christ’s followers participate in the same miracle of actual and practical renewal. The church is now Christ’s body.3 We serve as his ambassadors,4 his representatives in our weary world that’s all too familiar with the death and destruction that Christ promises deliverance from. As we consider the rampant corruption, wrongdoing, and abuse in our world still today, believers are called to testify to Christ’s resurrection power. In word, yes, but Updike’s poem reminds us that we should also testify in deed.
It’s what the Apostles did. These early Christ followers, many martyred for the gospel, affirmed and practiced Romans 8:11. They put their very lives on the line, trusting that the one who raised Christ from the dead—the one who reverses, reknits, rekindles—would do the same for them. Jesus is the source of life.5 He makes all things new.6 That hope of new life, a life beyond death, is yet available for us. It’s a truth that should shape how we go about our business, how we live our lives in the moment, and our vision for how wrongs will be set right.
As we look out on a world that’s groaning under the weight of sin, that’s daily devastated by death of all stripes, the fact of Jesus’ resurrection emboldens us to act. We draw strength from him to resist the work of death and to turn away from deeds of darkness.7 When we see injustice, Christ’s resurrection empowers us to speak out against it and stand up for the mistreated, even to put our own physical comfort and safety on the line. And as Christ followers, as ambassadors of the risen Christ, we should willingly and gladly do so. For what have we to fear if we follow a God who brings the dead back to life?
Facebook post from March 31, 2025.
“And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.”
Ephesians 1:23
2 Corinthians 5:20
John 14:6
Revelation 21:5
Ephesians 5:11