Yesterday we went to a seminar on Matthew’s Gospel led by Michael Card and then attended a concert given by him at Holy Trinity Church in Hinckley. One of the things he talked about was the joy of becoming a grandfather for the first time eighteen weeks ago and how this had rekindled in him the need to write lullabies (though he said the difference was, as a parent you write lullabies to get your children to go to sleep, whereas as a grandfather, he wanted to write them to wake up the baby so he could play!) I have been listening to Michael Card’s music for thirty years now and it occurred to me that my son has listened to it for his entire life; we included one of the original lullabies (from the album ‘Sleep Sound in Jesus’) at his dedication service when he was eight weeks old!
‘In Your loving arms we lay
This wordless one so new
The incarnation of our love,
We dedicate to You.’ (‘Wordless One’, Michael Card)
More recently, Michael Card has been writing books and songs based on the gospels and yesterday’s seminar looked at Matthew’s Gospel. Each gospel throws a different light on Jesus. In Mark, He is seen as something of a disturbing presence, speaking and acting with absolute authority and the people are both drawn to Him and afraid of Him. In Luke, the marginalised and oppressed are the one who are drawn to Jesus and there is always a contrast between the religious people (who ought to have understood Jesus’s message but who so often failed to understand it or receive it) and the poor (who embraced it gladly.) In John (which includes many stories not included in the other gospels), Jesus is portrayed as the Wisdom of God. Matthew could be seen as the ‘gospel of identity’, showing the Jewish Christians who were undergoing persecution at the time who Jesus is and therefore who they are. The gospel has different themes running through it, including:
- the enemy’s attempts to kill Jesus (starting with the Slaughter of the Innocents, only recorded in Matthew’s Gospel and going on through numerous attempts to thwart God’s plans by killing Jesus)
- the importance of dreams in this gospel
- the ‘fulfilment formula’ (how Matthew links what happened to the Old Testament Scriptures)
- the importance of Galilee in the life of Jesus
- identity (how my identity is seen through Christ’s identity, for ‘all self-disclosure is Christological’)
- long blocks of the teaching of Jesus (largely omitted in Mark, where the emphasis is more on what Jesus did than on what He said)
- the tension between the old and the new (especially seen in Matthew 13)
- the importance of hesed (mercy, grace, loving kindness) in God’s workings with mankind (how we do not deserve anything from God, but He gives us everything).