With blood and wound up on the fingers clenched the hands pierced by nails. The face still bearing the marks of the final death throes of the agony aunt shell blood everywhere this is. Her. On the dot in our you see how the other figures its the people standing under the cross held by this violence they seem to be crushed by it go home and be unkind to ones ardent. Dramas that i dont for a long fingered john the baptist is pointing to this agony to the horror of seeing them in or its ramifications and violence in. The death and resurrection of jesus christ are the central tenets of the christian faith. For two thousand years the symbol of the cross has pointed to this religious mystery. You see it everywhere in the christian world. It is displayed on graves it is a trademark and an ornament. It crowns the highest mountains. Yet people have always viewed the cross with revulsion and as a contradiction for the crucifixion combines two seemingly irreconcilable entities cruelty and our yearning for the divine. Get out of the i associate grace thanksgiving and or with the cross and. Of course you know hes going to get you for me i have ambivalent feelings about researchers im not religious so it doesnt speak to me as strict charge people thought i know the meaning of a cross but i just view it as somebody poured their good for me the main issue for me was how to take the terrorist action and my intention is simply to make this subject accessible to none of us really know what its like a all what it isnt like east or the mission is dismissed me i didnt. Want to give the bits you guys where does our relationship to the cross begin. Where i grew up in the socalled christian west everybody relates to it thats how we grow up i hope its you and its whos with him and so small for some. Its strong because of pride my subject of the cross forms a large part of my artistic work but i definitely dont want to make a cross simply as a piece of declaration that god to you i want to use my art to explore who and what we are you managing inside of a to go. New dimension. Can be gone maya is a sculptor who lives in bavaria in southern germany the crucifixion and the cross are central themes in his work. For a new cemetery in munich he has created a crucifixion sculpture that departs from tradition. As intention was to give his cross something he thinks traditional depictions have lost the mystery. The concert sculpture across in the void. Has been the David Coleman i had the idea of making this crossing unsubstantial as a space move the question was how will this. Reform square oak trial set up in a square with an empty space between them south across emerges in outline. Form of the moon and where you stand inside it youre standing in this space this unsubstantial cross lloyds and whether you look up and you see the cross with cords. Focus on the cross in the void because this mace isnt limited and it stretches in every direction thats very existential like our earthly existence. Of dish and also. The significance of the cross for christianity began two thousand years ago in jerusalem. Here jesus of nazareth called the christ and the son of god by his followers. Was executed like a common criminal. Steadfast in his belief in gods kingdom on earth he was mocked and crucified as king of the jews. His disciples fled in confusion. Then we are told he rose from the dead and appeared to them. Reports of this extraordinary event marked the beginning afghanistan and. The encounter inspired his disciples to go out into the world and spread his message. The german theologian Peter Schultz has studied the symbol of the cross and its message. First is this god of the fourth and whats in possibly the most fascinating thing about the cross and that is that it challenges us to see the most holy the most divine being that one can imagine the creator of heaven and earth suffering and tortured and dying on the cross. As. Even today its a mystery as to how it could have happened that there were people who saw god in this shocking execution seems highly because this is a bricktop they interpret it jesuss death as a reconciliation between god and the world thats lost one of the most affliction can be seen in the context of sacrifice an idea were familiar with in classical antiquity an offering is made to appease god saw it really felt. This is my body which is given for you for the forgiveness of sins these words were reportedly spoken by jesus on the eve of his execution. Gradually the idea grew that his death was a cosmic event and that jesus was not simply a man of great wisdom and goodness but god himself. By sharing the life of humans even to the point of dying and then rising from the dead he reversed our fate opening the door to life after death. Squads closely the border of cross was always at the center of the christian message was you see this in the earliest new testament tanks but the visual symbol hardly appears for several centuries whose one of the earliest depictions of a crucifixion that we know of is a drawing in rome a sort of mocking cartoon of a donkey on a cross court start of the oldest surviving to picture of the jesuss crucifixion is on the door of the church of st sabina on the oven time here christians in the first centuries seem to have had a problem accepting the symbol of defeat execution and suffering to represent their faith and their god. Youre young and forgot. The conversion of the Roman Emperor constantine marked a turning point legend has it that constantine had a vision on the eve of battle in the year three hundred twelve he saw the cross and the words in this sign conquer. He had crosses painted on his soldiers shields and he won that decisive battle the emperor converted and declared christianity the state religion. Another point on the cross lost its associations with the shameful death it spread across the roman empire first in the form of a monogram combine in the first two letters of the greek word christophes keith and row. Over the centuries it was increasingly figured as across. In these early depictions the crucified jesus is shown as christians of that era wish to see him already victorious over life and death living and triumphant. Yes i know this stone looks very simple at first sight or the cross has arms of equal length from the bar but its from the seventh century the guy who during the marriage engine dinnerstein the graves are priests and high ranking officials were marked with stones like this least. I suggest arkell significance is that they indicate Christian Grace or it is because i remember they were still heathens in the seventh century and those who got a high haps the deceased or their relatives and hope that all wish to mark the graves so that none would be forgotten on the day of judgment on top assumes its but its kind of a guessing. Originally dissemble of an agonizing and shameful death the cross became a sign of hope and redemption what christians call the mystery of faith. From this point on christians have looked for ways of expressing this faith. They have looked at artists to give visual forms to this provocative mystery and to communicate a belief that elites reason. Either about the next battle aside this work doesnt look at all like a cross or fixed us it was a but i would say use of the voice was focusing here in one nine hundred seventy one on aspects of death and resurrection which the cross represents you here is that. A simple wooden crate. An ammunition crate from the Second World War its contents represented down. Above the crate the dead trunk of a spears. The trunk of a Christmas Tree as a symbol of christs birth. Nailed to the crate a twisted crucifix a depiction of the crucified christ. And finally on the tree a small sculpture. A miners lamp as always called the sculpture of a light source. Make up the stairs and cough was i believe it is a universe of ideas searching around the question of the cross if that and hope is a sign of hope it is a symbol of death it is a minute here in this to and fro we as few as a challenge to form our own opinion to adopt our own position and. To think again now in bed i think that in this way it connects us with a long tradition of the cross as a christian symbol. Where confronted with a question what do we want quite simply life or death. Leading the top guns i have. I. I. I can one beagle maya began his artistic career as a wood carver training at the famous open school in southern germany where hes now a teacher. The over im a gal crucifixes bearing the traditional medieval corpus a world famous. As a positive i know i attended the school myself more than forty years ago it was a formative experience and still is this is the students here are all individualists and on this it is mostly technical skill at tortilla the handicraft lets hear from this may learn how to copy a Historical Sculpture in this case a figure of christ in exact detail just except its appropriate and. I. A town full of crucifixes over im a gal in the bavarian alps. The tradition of wood carving here goes back five hundred years. But religious wood carving is a dying profession. A crucifix in the home common in germany until quite recently is a rarity now. Nowadays people who seek spirituality tend to search somewhere else. But. For many that means nature. Mountaintops have always figured as places of spirituality in ancient myths and even biblical stories. Places where you can encounter god and through god yourself. Christians are no exception and have planted their cross on the peaks. People who climb mountains often describe experiences they cant find elsewhere. Perhaps because the wide vistas make them aware of their own weakness and imperfections. Discover fund thats the nature does have a special spirituality it has its own spirit and guys that all feel it but this aura of holiness is closely related to what religions associate with the divine and the holy within. Them i mean for being. In eight hundred ten the german romantic artist caspar davidge fleet white painted mourning in the face and bianca at the time people argued about whether the cross was appropriately displayed. But the artist stood at the vanguard of a new movement. Down the courts of stuff the law modern depictions of the cross usually play with the idea of disappearance with distance with a transitory than the historical cross on gaza appears to be sinking further and further into the fog of history its infinitely far away. The only way left open to us to keep it in the present is not the historical reconstruction of events that occurred two thousand years ago but to grasp it inwardly you know if youre a fossil. What form could the symbolism of the cross adopt now. Pam and beagle meyers gilded wooden sculpture evolved from the idea of folding a blank sheet of paper. And folding the paper he created across. Gods isnt people have been making crosses for more than two thousand is so its very difficult to come up with a new version a new perspective a new way of depicting the cross. Pastor knows where to find it. Has little interest in art as an an with selective act of piety