70

On Jordan's Bank the Baptist's Cry

Full Text

1 On Jordan’s bank the Baptist’s cry
announces that the Lord is nigh.
Awake and harken, for he brings
glad tidings of the King of kings!

2 Then cleansed be every life from sin:
make straight the way for God within,
and let us all our hearts prepare
for Christ to come and enter there.

3 We hail you as our Savior, Lord,
our refuge and our great reward.
Without your grace we waste away
like flowers that wither and decay.

4 Stretch forth your hand, our health restore,
and make us rise to fall no more.
O let your face upon us shine
and fill the world with love divine.

5 All praise to you, eternal Son,
whose advent has our freedom won,
whom with the Father we adore,
and Holy Spirit, evermore.

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Scripture References

Thematically related:

Further Reflections on Scripture References

John the Baptist's announcement "Prepare the way for the Lord" (Matt. 3:3, a quote from Isa. 40:3) is the primary basis for this Advent hymn. Stanzas 1 and 2 apply that message to people today; stanza 3 is a confession by God's people of their need for salvation; stanza 4 is a prayer for healing and love; stanza 5 is a doxology. This much-loved Advent text is laced with various scriptural phrases.

 

Psalter Hymnal Handbook

Confessions and Statements of Faith References

Further Reflections on Confessions and Statements of Faith References

What is notable about this song is that it concludes with a Trinitarian doxology, thus pointing to the truth that the coming of Christ was clearly a redeeming action involving all three members of the Trinity. Heidelberg Catechism captures the role of each member of the Trinity in Lord’s Day 12, Question and Answer 31 when it professes that Christ is called anointed, because he has been “ordained by God the Father and has been anointed with the Holy Spirit” to be our prophet, priest, and king.

70

On Jordan's Bank the Baptist's Cry

Call to Worship

The Lord be with you.
And also with you.
As we enter this season of Advent,
may the love of God the Father, and the grace of Jesus the Son,
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be and abide with us all.
Amen!
[Reformed Worship 57:4]
— Worship Sourcebook Edition Two

Confession

Almighty God,
you who shaped out of nothing all that is,
forgive us for returning empty-handed.
You who called forth light,
forgive our preference for the dark!
You who sent John to be a voice crying,
forgive our unwillingness to say anything at all!
Create in us clean hearts, O God,
and renew a right spirit within us.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
[Reformed Worship 33:10]
— Worship Sourcebook Edition Two
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence—
as when fire kindles brushwood
and the fire causes water to boil—
to make your name known to your adversaries,
so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect,
you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.
From ages past no one has heard,
no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you,
who works for those who wait for him.
You meet those who gladly do right,
those who remember you in your ways.
But you were angry, and we sinned;
because you hid yourself we transgressed.
We have all become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.
We all fade like a leaf,
and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
There is no one who calls on your name,
or attempts to take hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us,
and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;
we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand.
Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord,
and do not remember our iniquity forever.
Restore us, we pray, through the coming of our Lord Jesus,
in whom we place our hope and trust. Amen.
—based on Isaiah 64:1-9, NRSV
— Worship Sourcebook Edition Two

Assurance

See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me,
and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.
The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—
indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.
But who can endure the day of his coming,
and who can stand when he appears?
For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap;
he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver,
and he will purify the descendants of Levi
and refine them like gold and silver,
until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.
Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord
as in the days of old and as in former years.
The messenger of the Lord has come in Christ.
In Christ, we present offerings to the Lord in righteousness!
Thanks be to God for his lavish grace!
—based on Malachi 3:1-4, NRSV
— Worship Sourcebook Edition Two

Additional Prayers

We are called as pilgrim followers of Jesus Christ
to steer our lives carefully in this world,
lest we lose our way and mar our leader’s name.
We give thanks for generations of saints
who walked the way before us.
Their strong profession and bold obedience
are gifts to us, a tradition to guide us.
As we seek to follow our Lord in the time and place marked out for us,
we depend on God’s help alone:
Keep us, we pray, from the disobedient perils
of cementing ourselves in the past
and of chasing after fads in the present.
Help us to take heart from our faith’s ancestors,
to live intentionally for our faith’s heirs,
and to delight and honor you. Amen.
[The Worship Sourcebook]
— Worship Sourcebook Edition Two
70

On Jordan's Bank the Baptist's Cry

Tune Information

Name
PUER NOBIS
Key
D Major
Meter
8.8.8.8

Recordings

Musical Suggestion

Don’t let the four part texture of PUER NOBIS fool you into playing slowly. The song should spring forward at a quick pace. If you want to convey a stronger sense of the text’s drama—the Baptist’s cry—try singing to the tune DEO GRACIAS.
— Greg Scheer
The first two stanzas are directives, sung from one worshiper to another. The final three stanzas are prayers, offered by all the people to God. This change in the text's focus can be reflected by having the first two stanzas sung by a choir or soloist and the final three stanzas sung by the congregation.
 
The development of these five stanzas also parallels the form of many worship services. The first stanza calls God's people to give attention to the coming Christ. The second calls people to receive God's presence and God's cleansing from sin. The third is a profession of faith in Christ. The fourth is a prayer for God's continued grace in our lives and in our world—a response to God's redeeming Word. The fifth is a doxology of praise. Consider using the hymn as a unifying motif for your Advent worship, beginning each section of the worship service with a different stanza.
 
PUER NOBIS works well both in a stately cathedral tempo that captures the weight of the Advent message and in a lilting medieval tempo that reflects the practice in the historical period of its origin. The former would feel the quarter note as the pulse, perhaps at ♩=100. Such a tempo would be appropriate when using the hymn as a solemn processional. The latter would give the pulse to the dotted half (two beats per measure) at a tempo up to Dotted Half-note=100 and could be accompanied lightly by recorders or flutes. The melody may also be sung in canon, using the accompaniment found in My Praise to You, Eternal God, by Donald Busarow (Augsburg).
 
Several fine arrangements of this hymn are available for organ, perhaps used appropriately as a prelude in a service where this is the opening hymn. See arrangements by Thomas Gieschen (in Volume 2 of The Concordia Hymn Prelude Series—Concordia 97-5536), Paul Manz (in Ten Chorale Preludes, Volume 2—Concordia 97-4656—now published by Morning Star), and by Healey Willan ("Chorale Prelude no. 1"—Oxford University Press).
 
Fine alternate harmonizations and a descant are available in Sir David Will-cocks's arrangement of PUER NOBIS to the text "Come, Thou Redeemer of the Earth" (in Carols for Choirs II—Oxford University Press). See also the introduction and free accompaniment settings by John Ferguson (Hymn Harmonizations, Book I, Ludwig Music, O-05).
(from Reformed Worship, Issue 25)
— John Witvliet
70

On Jordan's Bank the Baptist's Cry

Hymn Story/Background

John the Baptist's announcement "Prepare the way for the Lord" (Matt. 3:3, a quote from Isa. 40:3) is the primary basis for this Advent hymn. Stanzas 1 and 2 apply that message to people today; stanza 3 is a confession by God's people of their need for salvation; stanza 4 is a prayer for healing and love; stanza 5 is a doxology. This much-loved Advent text is laced with various scriptural phrases.
 
PUER NOBIS is a melody from a fifteenth-century manuscript from Trier. However, the tune probably dates from an earlier time and may even have folk roots. PUER NOBIS was altered in Spangenberg's Christliches Gesangbüchlein (1568), in Petri's famous Piae Cantiones (1582), and again in Praetorius's Musae Sioniae (Part VI, 1609), which is the basis for the triple-meter version of this tune. Another form of the tune in duple meter is usually called PUER NOBIS NASCITUR. The tune name is taken from the incipit of the original Latin Christmas text, which was translated into German by the mid-sixteenth century as "Uns ist geborn ein Kindelein," and later in English as "Unto Us a Boy Is Born." The harmonization is from the 1902 edition of George R. Woodward's Cowley Carol Book.
 
— Bert Polman

Author Information

Charles Coffin (b. Buzancy, Ardennes, France, 1676; d. Paris, France, 1749) wrote this text in Latin (“Jordanis oras praevia”) for the Paris Breviary (1736), a famous Roman Catholic liturgical collection of psalms, hymns, and prayers. Coffin was partially responsible for the compilation of that hymnbook. Latin remained the language of scholarship and of the Roman Catholic liturgy in the eighteenth century. Working in that tradition, Coffin was an accomplished Latin scholar and writer of Latin poems and hymns. Educated at Deplessis College of the University of Paris, he served on the faculty and was university rector at the College of Doirmans-Beauvais, the University of Paris. He collected a hundred of his hymns and published them in Hymni Sacri (1736); a number of these have found their way into English language hymnals, including this Advent hymn.
 
The English translation is a composite work based on a translation by John Chandler, who published it in Hymns of the Primitive Church (1837). (Chandler thought it was a medieval text!) Since 1837, various hymnal editors have revised the text in attempts to bring the translation closer to Coffin's original.
 

Composer Information

Born into a staunchly Lutheran family, Michael Praetorius (b. Creuzburg, Germany, February 15, 1571; d. Wolfenbüttel, Germany, February 15, 1621) was educated at the University of Frankfort-an-der-Oder. In 1595 he began a long association with Duke Heinrich Julius of Brunswick, when he was appoint­ed court organist and later music director and secretary. The duke resided in Wolfenbüttel, and Praetorius spent much of his time at the court there, eventually establishing his own residence in Wolfenbüttel as well. When the duke died, Praetorius officially retained his position, but he spent long periods of time engaged in various musical appointments in Dresden, Magdeburg, and Halle. Praetorius produced a prodigious amount of music and music theory. His church music consists of over one thousand titles, including the sixteen-volume Musae Sionae (1605-1612), which contains Lutheran hymns in settings ranging from two voices to multiple choirs. His Syntagma Musicum (1614-1619) is a veritable encyclopedia of music and includes valuable information about the musical instruments of his time.
 
 
— Bert Polman
Educated at Caius College in Cambridge, England, George R. Woodward (b. Birkenhead, Cheshire, England, 1848; d. Highgate, London, England, 1934) was ordained in the Church of England in 1874. He served in six parishes in London, Norfolk, and Suffolk. He was a gifted linguist and translator of a large number of hymns from Greek, Latin, and German. But Woodward's theory of translation was a rigid one–he held that the translation ought to reproduce the meter and rhyme scheme of the original as well as its contents. This practice did not always produce singable hymns; his translations are therefore used more often today as valuable resources than as congregational hymns. With Charles Wood he published three series of The Cowley Carol Book (1901, 1902, 1919), two editions of Songs of Syon (1904, 1910), An Italian Carol Book (1920), and the Cambridge Carol Book (1924). Much of the unfamiliar music introduced in The English Hymnal (1906) resulted from Woodward's research. He also produced an edition of the Piae Cantiones of 1582 (1910) and published a number of his translations in Hymns of the Greek Church (1922).
— Bert Polman

Song Notes

In The Message, Eugene Peterson paraphrases Matthew 3:3 in these words: “Thunder in the desert! Prepare for God’s arrival! Make the road smooth and straight!” In the New International Version, this first line is written, “A voice of one calling in the wilderness.” Why does Peterson use “thunder” instead of “voice”? It’s possible he’s trying to evoke the imagination, or startle us into being aware and ready for Christ in a way that a normal voice couldn’t do. Peterson uses this tactic again in Revelation 2-3, where, at the end of each letter to the churches, it is written, “Are your ears awake? Listen. Listen to the Wind Words, the Spirit blowing through the churches.” In preparation of Christ’s birth, and in preparation of his second coming, we are instructed to listen. Before we can prepare our hearts, we must know why and how we would do so. We must listen to the cry of the Holy Spirit with all of the rapt attention with which we listen to great peals of thunder and rustling winds. We must sharpen our senses so they are alive to the voice of God in our lives. As the hymnist writes, we must “awake and harken!”
 
— Laura de Jong
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