God’s Truth for Today published a short contemplation by Dr. Chris Simmons, a member of the pastoral team at Frye Regional Medical Center in Hickory on “Resurrection: Our Impossible Anchor — Faith and Values.” John Updike’s often-quoted “Seven Stanzas at Easter” were immediately invoked.
“At 28, novelist John Updike got to the bottom of the Resurrection,” Simmons wrote. “Updike would fear death throughout his life. His sober awareness of this surely led him to write “Make no mistake: if He rose at all / it was His body; / if the cells dissolution did not / reverse, the molecules / reknit, the amino acids reignite, / the Church will fall.”
“Updike realized that the scandal of the resurrection, that a human could raise the dead, had to be true or the faith had to be abandoned. He wouldn’t want to make a metaphor out of it or redefine it or make it less of a stumbling block. He seems to have believed that he could only be saved from eternal death by a Savior who had conquered it himself,” Simmons wrote.