7 min
The Grail of Creation The Way We Practice
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- Christianity
When I was a child, few movies captured my imagination like the Indiana Jones series. Indy was everything I wanted to be—an adventuring scholar, at home equally in a library or a jungle; a good guy with a gruff edge. I saved my money, bought myself a felt fedora and a whip, and set off into the woods in search of adventure. I didn’t discover the Ark of the Covenant or escape ancient booby traps, but I did find a few old bottles and a cobbled leather shoe—exciting enough fare for a nine-year-old.
Perhaps it was a sense of nostalgia for that excitement that led me, on a night when my family was away, to sit down to dinner and watch my favorite film in the series: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
For those who don’t remember or have had the misfortune of never seeing it, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade traces Dr. Jones’s adventures in search of the Holy Grail, all the while battling Nazis and encountering the supernatural despite his skepticism.
In one of the early scenes of the film, Jones is discussing the Grail with his colleague Marcus Brody. Jones is skeptical about the Grail legend which he takes to be little more than a Medieval fairytale. Brody responds that, "The search for the cup of Christ is the search for the divine in all of us. But if you want facts, I have none to give you. At my age I'm willing to take a few things on faith.”
Brody’s response is a wise one, one that names, perhaps, the reason for the long and flourishing tradition of Holy Grail stories, from L’morte de Arthur to Monty Python. We all want to understand our relationship to the divine and so the grail legend has been a vehicle for us to explore this mystery in the best way human beings know how: through stories. With the grail on my mind, I began to work through a problem I’ve been pondering, the problem of the Ascension.
Creation, incarnation, resurrection—these are essentials for our understanding of God in Christ and each has a great resonance for me. Part of the reason Christianity has remained my faith and practice is because of our profound belief that God created the world and redeemed it by becoming a part of creation, suffering inside of it, and opening the way for new life within it through resurrection. But the Ascension has always been a hard reality for me because it seems to be moving in the opposite direction. The Ascension appears to say that Christ was simply a visitor to earth, like some alien from a spaceship, who doesn’t belong here and so has left us for a better place, like a big shot who gets stuck in coach on an airplane and is quickly ushered to first class by an apologetic flight attendant.
To put it more theologically, how do we make sense of Christ’s promise in the Gospel of Matthew to be with us always, even until the end of the age, when it seems that in the Ascension Christ has clearly abandoned us, albeit under the divine care of the Holy Spirit? How is it, as Ephesians puts it, that Christ who is seated at the Father’s “right hand in the heavenly places” is also the one “who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:15-23)?
I found help for my questions in a wonderful essay by the exiled Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov (1874-1944). Bulgakov takes up the quandary of the Ascension and solves it by drawing on the tradition of the Holy Grail with a brilliant twist. The Holy Grail tradition, of course, is that the cup Christ drank from at the last supper was then given to Joseph of Arimathea who used it to catch the blood and water that spilled from Christ’s side when he was pierced on the cross. Legend has it that Joseph then took the Grail to England where it was hidden and became sought after by such great knights as Sir Galahad of the King Arthur’s round table.
These are legends of course, but Bulgakov draws on these legends to say something profound. “The image of the Holy Grail, in which the holy blood of Christ is kept,” he writes, “expresses precisely the idea that,
When I was a child, few movies captured my imagination like the Indiana Jones series. Indy was everything I wanted to be—an adventuring scholar, at home equally in a library or a jungle; a good guy with a gruff edge. I saved my money, bought myself a felt fedora and a whip, and set off into the woods in search of adventure. I didn’t discover the Ark of the Covenant or escape ancient booby traps, but I did find a few old bottles and a cobbled leather shoe—exciting enough fare for a nine-year-old.
Perhaps it was a sense of nostalgia for that excitement that led me, on a night when my family was away, to sit down to dinner and watch my favorite film in the series: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
For those who don’t remember or have had the misfortune of never seeing it, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade traces Dr. Jones’s adventures in search of the Holy Grail, all the while battling Nazis and encountering the supernatural despite his skepticism.
In one of the early scenes of the film, Jones is discussing the Grail with his colleague Marcus Brody. Jones is skeptical about the Grail legend which he takes to be little more than a Medieval fairytale. Brody responds that, "The search for the cup of Christ is the search for the divine in all of us. But if you want facts, I have none to give you. At my age I'm willing to take a few things on faith.”
Brody’s response is a wise one, one that names, perhaps, the reason for the long and flourishing tradition of Holy Grail stories, from L’morte de Arthur to Monty Python. We all want to understand our relationship to the divine and so the grail legend has been a vehicle for us to explore this mystery in the best way human beings know how: through stories. With the grail on my mind, I began to work through a problem I’ve been pondering, the problem of the Ascension.
Creation, incarnation, resurrection—these are essentials for our understanding of God in Christ and each has a great resonance for me. Part of the reason Christianity has remained my faith and practice is because of our profound belief that God created the world and redeemed it by becoming a part of creation, suffering inside of it, and opening the way for new life within it through resurrection. But the Ascension has always been a hard reality for me because it seems to be moving in the opposite direction. The Ascension appears to say that Christ was simply a visitor to earth, like some alien from a spaceship, who doesn’t belong here and so has left us for a better place, like a big shot who gets stuck in coach on an airplane and is quickly ushered to first class by an apologetic flight attendant.
To put it more theologically, how do we make sense of Christ’s promise in the Gospel of Matthew to be with us always, even until the end of the age, when it seems that in the Ascension Christ has clearly abandoned us, albeit under the divine care of the Holy Spirit? How is it, as Ephesians puts it, that Christ who is seated at the Father’s “right hand in the heavenly places” is also the one “who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:15-23)?
I found help for my questions in a wonderful essay by the exiled Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov (1874-1944). Bulgakov takes up the quandary of the Ascension and solves it by drawing on the tradition of the Holy Grail with a brilliant twist. The Holy Grail tradition, of course, is that the cup Christ drank from at the last supper was then given to Joseph of Arimathea who used it to catch the blood and water that spilled from Christ’s side when he was pierced on the cross. Legend has it that Joseph then took the Grail to England where it was hidden and became sought after by such great knights as Sir Galahad of the King Arthur’s round table.
These are legends of course, but Bulgakov draws on these legends to say something profound. “The image of the Holy Grail, in which the holy blood of Christ is kept,” he writes, “expresses precisely the idea that,
7 min