The Inescapable Story of Easter

Via Ross Douthat (again) a John Updike poem on Easter -- here is a sample:

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.

I remember hearing a Mennonite pastor telling the story of his dying mother, a simple Russian immigrant approaching death seeing Jesus at the foot of her bed. He took this to be a hallucination symbolic of her deep faith -- and nothing else. As Updike reminds us, this not only misses the point, it "mocks God."