Andrew Peterson

Item: Behold the Lamb of God: The True Tall Tale of the Coming of Christ
Author: Steve Stockman

Behold the Lamb of God: The True Tall Tale of the Coming of Christ

(2004)

Reviewed by Steve Stockman

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Label FerventThe Phantom Tollbooth2004

acoustic rock folk singer-songwriter

Andrew Peterson has produced an album that is brilliant in concept, in musical construction, in poetic adeptness, in theological eruditeness, and in personal and cultural challenge. There is a one line that swings the album in the hurtling heavenly meteorite way that Christ's birth turns history. "Labour of Love" sung by Jill Phillips begins "It was not a silent night..." and gives as realistic a picture of that Christmas manger as pen ever put to paper. It is a quality storytelling song, giving us an angle into Mary and Joseph and the events consuming them. It is at the same time personally intimate in the moment and vast in eternal consequences. Phillips tackles it with the kind of performance it deserves. It is a magnificent expression and leaves many of our traditional carols bereft of such earthiness; and earthiness is crucial to this particular story!

The same sense of reality and mystery fills the rest of a record that firstly leads us to this song and then brings us forward from it. As with the Scriptural record Peterson has contextualized this moment of birth in a one thousand year plus history of a people needing a deliverer. Derek Webb makes a guest appearance on "Deliver Us." which sets the course right through to Mary's agony. After the birth we are taken forward to the cross of the baby to show the ultimate cost of that deliverance. There is history, there is prophecy, there is theology. It is an epic in Biblical intent, heavy in detail and yet it succeeds in that the songs remain economic and light of touch.

We even get a song about the begetting; the genealogy of Jesus. Now though Christians believe that all of the Bible is equally inspired by God, the genealogies are always a reminder that it is not all equally inspiring! That Peterson has succeeded here on "Matthew's Begats" is a revelation of the uniqueness and achievement of what could be called a play in a song cycle rather than a musical.

Many have seen Peterson as a worthy successor to the late Rich Mullins and if you keep in mind Mullins' posthumously released Jesus Album then this could sit snugly alongside it. In fact you cannot help think that Mullins might just have attempted a Christmas album. That he could not have hoped to have out done this is praise indeed. No need this Christmas for the same old carols re-arranged. Here is something much fresher and altogether more provocative and true to how it really was and is.