April 19, 2026 Reflection

Once again, a Bible reading about the disciples being encountered by the risen Christ and being afraid. For some of us these passages are so familiar that they are in danger of losing their power. For 2000 years people have been hearing this story and over those centuries the response has shifted from terror to incredulity, to doubt, to a rather blasé attitude. Right, right, right, he’s risen. I wonder what’s for dinner. Rather than rehash the Biblical story I want to start with three personal testimonies regarding my capacity to believe in the resurrected Jesus, or my struggle with that capacity. 

When I was at seminary, I was, as was the vogue at the time, very jaded regarding the literal understanding of much of the Bible. I was quite confident in understanding that it’s mostly made up of myth, metaphor and muddled recounting of people who lived centuries ago. Our professors were of the same mind, shaped as they were in the early to mid-20th Century when deconstructing the words of scripture was a new and exciting thing. My New Testament professor, Dr. Lloyd Gaston, regularly broke the brains of the more fundamentalist amongst us by deriding the ‘red letter’ bibles, Bibles in which the words of Jesus were written in red, assuring us that Jesus probably never said those things. He had us write ‘text to sermon’ essays where we were to take apart pretty much every word of the Bible text, consider the original meaning of the words we now read in English, the historical, cultural, economic and political context of the time and then reconstruct it all for meaning in this time. While remaining true to the original intent. His critiques of our work were neither gentle nor kind. More than once a paper was returned to me with only the word NO! written in red ink. With, an exclamation mark.

And yet, this brilliant man, whose whole life was steeped in study and research of the Bible, who constantly debunked many of the common but wrong interpretations that many of us held as ‘gospel’, one day presented to us a poem by John Updike that he said held the truth of the resurrection. Mike Hetherington will read us this poem, Seven Stanzas at Easter, by John Updike. 

Seven Stanzas at Easter, by John Updike
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 thing painted in the faded credulity
of earlier ages: let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier mache, not 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 make it less monstrous, for in 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, “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” in Telephone Poles and Other Poems (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964), 72–3.

We, Gaston’s students, were incredulous. But how can you, after all your cutting-edge work on the New Testament (he was one of the first to name the New Testament as giving rise to the anti-Semitism of our time), how can you hold to such a literal understanding of the resurrection? He was equally incredulous – how can you believe a myth or metaphor would change the course of history? Could move countless generations of people to risk their very lives, give their very lives, in commitment to ensuring God’s kingdom is lived out on earth? If Jesus wasn’t raised, said our professor, then he, our teacher, would be Jewish. 

I have lived my close to 35 years of ordained ministry haunted by Professor Lloyd Gaston and this poem. I mean, no one wants a red-lettered NO! on their essays, but, more critically, what I believe about something is very much undergirded by the credibility of the person who told me the thing. And Professor Gaston had and continues to have, enormous credibility for me. So, I ask myself quite regularly, what do I do with this poem, this very literal proclamation of the resurrection, and Gaston’s offering it as testimony? I still struggle, in a loving, life-giving way, with how much of the poem’s crystal clarity I embrace, and how much I just can’t go there. 

Another personal Easter witness – my dad died on an Easter Sunday. His last words were ‘Happy Easter’. And my mom’s first words on his death were, ‘We made it.” For her the ending was victorious because she was able to keep dad home until his death. I heard about his death from Brenda Fawkes, when I returned to my office after we both led the Easter Sunday service at Wilson Hights United. Brenda had taken the phone call. And ever since then, between my dad and Brenda, the meaning and power of ‘life everlasting’ has been a live question for me. It’s beyond my comprehension that my dad is just gone. I find it comforting and a truth that he and all those who have died, are held in the memory of God, and so, in as much as God is with us, they are with us. Alive. 

My third testimony is that I was a die-hard conspiracy theorist in the 70’s. But from the other side, the left-wing side – believing that the inexorable power and evil of the powers and principalities of the monied class, the Epstein class, would eventually lead to an economic hegemony like we’re living in now. A time in which almost all the money and therefore the power are held in the hands of a very few. I wish vindication was a more satisfying emotion. I believed we were hooped, doomed, and could not imagine a way out. And then, I ended up back at church, a story for another time. And I heard again the words of hope, the words of a promise that ultimately evil would not overcome good, that death would not have the last word. No one was more surprised than I to find myself on my knees being ordained more than 30 years ago. And maybe you could say I was resurrected when I stood up again, raised into a new confidence and trust and faith in the possibilities of God. A faith, an allegiance which has sustained me when previously all the intellectual understanding of the world as it was and is and could be, had rendered me despairing. 

So, the meaning of Easter is always a dynamic tug for me. I cannot minimize the importance of Professor Gaston’s allegiance to Updike’s poem, to the gritty and grisly reality of a literal risen Christ. And I struggle to name what life after death looks like for the father that meant and continues to mean the world for me and my brother. The poem keeps me humble; it holds my feet to the fire when I am sorely tempted into flights of minimizing what really happened on the first Easter morning, when I am tempted to just blithely go with ‘it’s all a mystery’. It’s why you’re not singing ‘In the Bulb There is a Flower’ on my watch, because we expect flowers from bulbs, we expect butterflies from cocoons. We did not and frankly do not, expect a tortured, crucified, stabbed man to rise from the grave. 

Scripture’s witness to, and my experience of, the faith of others keeps me hopeful that there is Something Sustaining that escapes the mortal mind’s capacity to get a grip on, but that makes life bearable and the struggle for God’s kindom on earth mandatory and possible. And I’d rather say I don’t understand it all than hang butterflies from the ceiling on an Easter morning. 

One way through this puzzle, this tug between faith and rationality, is to re-think how we understand the word ‘believe’. Today, we use the word in an intellectual or cognitive way. When we say we ‘believe’ something, we mean we accept it cognitively, that we assent to a proposition with our intellect, our brain. What we say we believe makes sense in a rationale world and can be proven. But in the ancient world, the word we translate as ‘believe’ really means something more like ‘believing into’, and what you ‘believe into’ is a relationship. ‘Believe’ in this story does not mean ‘accept as intellectually true,’ or ‘hold an opinion about.’ ‘Believe’ means trust, bond with, be loyal or faithful to, have allegiance with. You trust and have allegiance to, are faithful to a person, to a relationship, to an experience in that relationship that can change you. (David Ewart, holytextures.com) Like an experience on that first Easter morning that moved and motivated people to rise up, to be part of a movement that inspires even to this day. 

Ultimately, the question for Thomas, and for us, is simply: “Can I trust that God in Christ really is still with me?” And if Jesus is too much of a trip wire for you, can you trust that however you understand the Sacred Creator, is still moving, creating, calling us to a better world? 

As we hope for the ongoing meaningful life of this community of faith, can we trust that the Holy Spirit is still at work here, calling us to new challenges and new risks? In our own lives, in this very moment, can we believe, can we trust that God is with us all along the Way? 

Before Jesus left (again) he gave the disciples a commissioning: “As I have been sent, so I send you.” And he breathes upon them, and they receive the Holy Spirit. Part of our ability to believe, to align with, to give our loyalty to the Holy comes from the truth that the Holy Spirit daily breathes into us more courage and capacity for wonder and belief and hope than we would imagine possible under our own steam. And that trust and allegiance is a mutual relationship; as we trust in God so God in Jesus has trusted and continues to trust in us. Together we walk the Way of life, through the valleys of shadows and into the light of new hope. Even when it’s not clear to us how it all works, let us live and lean into the belief that it does. 

Thanks be to God! Amen.