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A Resurrection Cross

8th April, 2011 - Posted by Wolf Paul - No Comments

I am currently attending a Webmasters’ Course at OM Germany, and was asked to lead devotions. Last week I was at another conference where the speaker was presented with a locally made cross as a thank you for taking the time to talk to us. It inspired me to present the following for devotions today. Much credit goes to the organization which created the cross — I took some of the text from their web page and fleshed it out for the devotional.

OM Webmasters’ Forum
Mosbach, Germany
Devotions for Friday, April 8, 2011

As you can see I will be talking about a cross today, and so I would like us to start by singing three verses of the hymn, “O Sacred Head Once Wounded.”

Torchbearers have a training center in Upper Austria, about an hour from Salzburg and a bit closer to Linz where Peter here lives, and in two nearby villages they also operate several woodworking shops for young men who are handicapped in a variety of ways.

One day, Anton Ulbing, the leader of the wood shop, was working with his young charges creating a rocking horse. When they were done, one of them was sweeping up the sawdust and wooden cut-offs. Suddenly Tony yelled, “Stop, stop, don’t throw that in the fire, I think I see some pieces I can use!” He took several of the cut-offs and when he was done, he had created the cross we see here, and which in a unique way proclaims at once both the message of the cross of Calvary and the message of the empty tomb.

Tony hung the cross over his desk, and for a while it hung there, until a friend noticed it and asked, “Hey Tony, what’s that?”

“Oh, nothing special, just a cross I put together from cut-offs. It reminds me of Good Friday, and the empty tomb reminds me of Easter.”

“Well, could you make me one?”

“Why not, but you’ll have to wait until we can fit it in with the regular work.”

A few more copies were made in this fashion, on the side, as the regular work in the wood shop permitted.

When someone asked for a smaller version of the cross, that became the prototype of the Easter Cross as a regular product.

Today the handicapped young men in the Kirchdorf workshop manufacture several hundred such crosses every year – each one of them carefully and lovingly hand-crafted.

Like every true work of art this really rather simple Easter Cross inspires people to see a variety of symbolic messages, perhaps even some the artist hadn’t been thinking about. I want to focus on four of them which we could call, analogously to the five pillars of Islam, the four pillars of the Christian gospel:

1. Christmas – Incarnation: Jesus is “of the same wood” as we are. This German expression, “aus demselben Holz geschnitzt”, “carved from the same wood”, is most often said of sons in comparison with their fathers, and is related to the English expression, “a chip off the old block.” Jesus was born as a human baby, he is carved from the same wood as we, and is thus truly man, tempted in all things as we are. But because he is also “a chip off the old block”, of the same nature as His heavenly Father, he is without sin and thus able to save us.

2. Good Friday – Crucifixion: Jesus died for us to save us from our sin which separates us from God. Jesus reminds us, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” And Paul points out that even while we were not His friends but His enemies, Christ loved us enough to die for us.

3. Easter – Resurrection: Jesus died for us but he did not stay on the cross nor in the grave: he rose again and lives. The “rock of sorrows” has been rolled away by super-natural hands and the tomb is empty. It is an open door in the prison walls of the realm of the dead, through which we can walk from the darkness of death into the bright and wide open spaces of the glorious freedom of God’s children.

4. Pentecost – Annointing: The flame-shaped vertical beam of this cross reminds us that in the heart of every person who has experienced the grace of God’s forgiveness the Holy Spirit lights the flame of grateful love for God and for our fellow men: for our neighbors and friends, but also for the stranger and even our opponents and enemies.

Let me add two other thoughts: first, the way this cross came into being reminds us of the verse in Psalm 118: “The stone (in our case: the wood) that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This is the LORD’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.” Secondly, this thought attributed to Blaise Pascal seems very appropriate to this story : “It is beyond our comprehension what God can do with the broken shards of our dreams, if only we are prepared to give them completely into His hands.”

I want to close with a selection from Scripture which in the Anglican tradition is known as “The Easter Anthems” and which for me has become a standard text to read and ponder every year around Easter. I can still remember sharing this same text for devotions at an OM Linux course in England shortly after I discovered it:

Christ our passover has been sacrificed for us:
so let us celebrate the feast,
not with the old leaven
of corruption and wickedness:
but with the unleavened bread
of sincerity and truth. 1 Corinthians 5.7b, 8

Christ once raised from the dead dies no more;
death has no more dominion over him.
In dying he died to sin once for all:
in living he lives to God.
See yourselves therefore as dead to sin:
and alive to God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 6.9-11

Christ has been raised from the dead:
the first fruits of those who sleep.
For as by man came death:
by man has come also the resurrection
of the dead;
for as in Adam all die:
even so in Christ shall all be made alive. 1 Corinthians 15.20-22

All Glory to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit;
as it was in the beginning is now
and shall be for ever. Amen.

We began our time with Christ’s suffering, and we also talked about his resurrection; let us close by singing a few verses of “I Know That My Redeemer Lives!”

The Resurrection cross pictured and described here can be purchased from the Torchbearer’s Schloss Klaus ministry. Please use this contact page.

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