What If We Find the Holy Grail? | First Thoughts | First Things

I was hoping the author would delve more into the ramifications of the "what if" it is real and how would it impact the church as a whole. Instead Block approaches more from a religious/spiritual aspect: "At any rate, the Scriptures make clear that the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper was never the miracle in and of itself; the miracle of that night was what happened inside the cup." Personally I find the lore surrounding these alleged relics to be fascinating but there would be no means to authenticate that these relics have an actual physical place in history
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Back on Maundy Thursday, I became aware that the Holy Grail had been found—“again,” as the National Post quipped. The comment alludes to the fact that numerous pretenders to the Grail have been championed over the centuries—two hundred such “grails” exist in Europe alone, as the Guardian notes. The most recent claimant to the title—outlined in a new book entitled Kings of the Grail—is a goblet at a basilica in Leon, Spain.

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Lutherans like myself should not, therefore, simply deny the possibility that this or that physical object—or relic, if you will—might be used by God to convey miraculous power. He’s done it before; he can do it again if he so chooses. But there is a danger in putting too much stock in such relics, even if they are what they purport to be. One can easily slip from faith in the God who wrought wonders through an object to an idolatrous faith in the power of the object itself. This is precisely what occurred in the case of the bronze snake mentioned earlier. We read that in Hezekiah’s time it became necessary to destroy the snake, for the Israelites had begun to honor as if it had power itself—as if it were, in fact, a god (2 Kings 18:4).

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When it comes to relics, we cannot always be certain that this or that object has truly been chosen by God as a vessel of grace. Is this cup really the Grail? Is it another cup? Or was it lost to history shortly after the Last Supper? The history of Grail lore, like many relics, is long on assertions and short on certainty.

What If We Find the Holy Grail? | First Thoughts | First Things