The same year that John Updike published Rabbit, Run (1960), he entered a poem, “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” into a contest at a local Lutheran church. The poem won. Ever since it has been a favorite of those who want to reduce Easter to a physical event.

The first verse catches one’s attention, especially from someone who all his life wavered between doubt and belief:

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 is making it hard for himself. Doubters often do. Thomas, later in this same chapter, did: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my hand in his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25, NRSV). As I have done at times in my life. As perhaps you have also done.

But to do so, to insist that resurrection must be just this and nothing else is to miss the New Testament witness to Easter. The New Testament on resurrection is multiple, layered, giving us first one perspective and then another. Updike in the same poem insists that we “not mock God with metaphor, / analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,” but the New Testament does most of these things. It gives us the resurrection of Jesus as a window on mystery. We ought not to close the windows it opens.

So, for these Eastertide meditations, I hope to recount the gospel stories in all their multiplicity, in the back and forth between one story and another, one insisting with Updike on the sheer physicality of resurrection; the next saying, “No, it wasn’t like that at all.” Let’s open the windows of mystery wide—as wide as the writers of the New Testament have done for us. 

Touch (John 20:1-18)

For the opening story in the 20^th chapter of John, touch is key. The story of Mary Magdalene. Peter and “the other disciple,” perhaps John, make an appearance, but it’s not their story. It’s not to them that Jesus appears. They see mostly absence; Mary meets Jesus. 

The story is John’s sly way of talking about resurrection and ascension, about presence and absence. And for this story, touch is key: “Do not hold on to me,” Jesus says, “for I have not yet ascended to the Father.”

We know the word that Jesus uses in the story. It’s Greek haptō. We get “haptic” from it, for those strange vibrations that make our phones seem, well, alive. After Peter and John leave, Mary, weeping, leans down to look into the tomb. She sees angels, and they ask her, “Why are you weeping?” As she responds, she seems to sense someone behind her. She turns to find herself face-to-face with someone she takes to be the gardener (a nifty pun, kēpouros, “gardener” rather than kyrios, “Lord”) until he speaks. He, Jesus, repeats the question of the angels and adds his own, “Whom do you seek?”

The question echoes across the pages of the Gospel of John. In the first chapter, Jesus asks a nearly identical question of his first disciples. In the story, Jesus sees that two former disciples of John the Baptist are following him. He asks, “What are you looking for?” (1:38). They respond, “Where you abide.” Jesus says to them, “Come and see.” “Abiding” (Greek menō) is an important theme of John’s gospel.

Mary knows what she is looking for: a body. She says to the one she thinks to be the gardener, “If you have carried him away, tell me where you put him, and I will take him away” (20:15). There are all these words in the story for picking something up (a stone, a body) and putting it down. But the risen Jesus cannot be picked up and put down. Nor can you hang on to this Jesus: “Don’t hang on to me,” Jesus said, “For I am not yet ascended to the Father.” 

Where does the risen Jesus abide? He has answered this already. “Those who love me,” he says, “will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our abiding place with them” (John 14:23). So, first, community. Jesus dwells where those who love him abide.

And then also voice. It’s in the voice that Mary recognizes Jesus. And it’s her voice that will bring the good news of Easter to the others: “Go,” says Jesus, and say to them, echoing Ruth, “That I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (20:17).

All of which flies in the face of Updike’s Easter poem. Updike was looking for a body, something that can be picked up and put down. But the Mary Magdalene story gives us community and proclamation. Where does Jesus abide? Wherever there are those who say, “Christ is risen,” and those who respond, “He is risen indeed.”

Happy Easter!