A Reflection by Fuller President Richard J. Mouw

 None of the eulogies that I read about writer John Updike, who died in January, said anything about his funeral service. I hope it included a reading of his wonderful poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter.” The opening stanza is a straightforward piece of orthodoxy:
 

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.

And then in the third stanza Updike warns against the kinds of preaching we hear too often on Easter Sunday:

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.

(You can read the whole poem here .)
 
Updike is right. We don’t need mere metaphor. No vague stuff about “Spring bringing new life.” No freewheeling “Name your own tomb” kind of preaching. Easter is not a symbolic way of getting at some deeper truth. It is the deeper truth. The same body that went into the tomb came out again, as a living Person.

We need to hear that this year in a very special way. Life seems pretty dismal for many people. Dreams have turned into nightmares. Hopes have been dashed. Things that we have long taken for granted have proved unreliable.

We need good news. Very concrete, reliable good news. And here it is, as a literal truth that we can bet our lives on: “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!”