It was as His Flesh: ours

A bit belatedly, let me wish to all of our readers of this blog a most blessed Easter! The resurrection of Jesus—the Word made flesh—is a most important part of the Theology of the Body.  He is risen indeed!  Allelulia!  Jesus’ risen body demonstrates that our bodies are significant eternally to our Father God who loves us.  It is a foreshadowing of the resurrection bodies that our Father will one day give us.

I turn again to Kendall Harmon’s blog for a poem (from here) by John Updike that helps us see the sheer and solid reality of Jesus’ risen body.   Enjoy it.

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 ages:


let us walk through the door.



The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,


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.



--John Updike (1932-2009)