Chris Simmons penned a short “Meditation” for the Hickory Daily Record that considers Updike’s thoughts about the Resurrection:

“At 28, the novelist John Updike cut to the bottom line of the Resurrection. Updike would fear death throughout his life. His sober awareness of it surely led him to write ‘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.’

“Updike realized that the Resurrection’s scandal, that a human could rise from the dead, must be true or the faith should be abandoned. He would have none of making it metaphor or redefining it to become less of a stumbling block. He seems to have believed that he could only be saved from eternal death by a Savior who had defeated it himself. At 76, as he approached its threshold, Updike asked his wife, “Are you ready for the leap?”

“It’s easy for the reality of the scandal to lose its punch in our gospel-saturated, yet post-Christian culture, especially in western North Carolina where many of us watched Billy Graham relentlessly invoke the Crucifixion during crusades from just about everywhere. We should sternly resist our own casualness with it in an age when many wrongly treat it as folklore. The Crucifixion was exactly the opposite. The Romans opposed Christianity so strongly partly because early Christians, much like Updike, were so focused on reality itself.”