Johann Gottfried Olearius wrote this hymn in 1664 for his own uncle’s feast day, so to speak: it first appeared as a text for the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, June 24, in a collection Olearius published in Halle the same year his uncle Johann Olearius, author of the very next hymn in Lutheran Service Book, was producing hymns of his own. A mid-summer festival for John the Baptist rarely appears on a modern Sunday schedule, so later hymnal editors moved the text into Advent, where its subject, the Baptist as forerunner, fits naturally beside the Advent Gospels. Olearius wrote five stanzas; Lutheran Service Book prints only four, the hymnal committee having judged the original fourth stanza dispensable once the hymn needed to fit a single printed page without a turn. Paul E. Kretzmann’s 1940 translation, made for The Lutheran Hymnal, carries the text from the world under Moses’ curse through John’s leaping in his mother’s womb and his preaching by the Jordan to a closing prayer for the light and life that curse no longer holds. As the Opening hymn on Gaudete, it sets the whole service in motion by naming the very darkness the day’s Introit rejoices to see broken.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025