When Jesus came to Jordan 

Born in a suburb of Liverpool, Fred Pratt Green (1903-2000) studied theology at Didsbury Theological College (Nazarene Theological College) in Manchester; he was ordained to the Methodist ministry at age 25, serving in a number of circuits in England for 41 years.  He wrote poems and plays throughout his ministry, but the greatest number of his hymns were written after he retired from active ministry in 1969.  Pratt Green was one of a group of writers whose work formed the so-called “Hymn Explosion” of the mid-20th century in the United Kingdom.

 

This hymn had its beginning when a theology student working on a new Australian hymnbook asked Pratt Green for a hymn for the liturgy of the Baptism of Jesus.  In the end, the hymn was not chosen for inclusion in that hymn book; it was first published in More Hymns for Today (1980) in Great Britain and in the United States in The Hymns and Ballads of Fred Pratt Green (1982).  Beginning as if will be a narrative of the Baptism of Jesus, the hymn becomes instead an analysis of the event.  Jesus comes to Baptism in the first stanza not as a sinner, but as an emissary of his Father with the mission of taking on a share of the repentance of sinful human beings.  He comes to “speak the vital sentence" which initiates a new age.  The second stanza looks ahead to the salvation which Jesus offers through his Crucifixion; here, the single narrative detail of the biblical story, the dove of the Holy Ghost, becomes the sign of this new trajectory for mankind: the “age of grace.”  The last stanza invokes the Holy Ghost’s guidance to spiritual resurrection for those who sing the hymn.

 

We sing the tune “Offertorium,” adapted from a mass composed by Michael Haydn (1737-1806), younger brother of Franz Joseph.  (German High Mass in C major [Deutsches Hochamt in C] MH 560)  Like his brother, Michael was a chorister in St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna and, at age 12, a substitute organist there.  In 1760 he was appointed Kapellmeister to the Hungarian Episcopal Court of Várad ( now in Romania) and in 1762 Concertmaster to the Archbishop of Salzburg.  In 1781 he succeeded Mozart as organist of the Cathedral Church of Saints Rupert and Vergilius in Salzburg.  The tune, meant to be sung by the congregation in its original setting, was adapted as a hymn tune in the 1916 Supplement to A&M by Sidney Nicholson.  Nicholson paired it with Cowper’s “Sometimes a light surprises.”