Mein liebster Jesus ist verloren in B minor, BWV 154

Bach performed the cantata in 1724, his first year in Leipzig on the First Sunday after Epiphany. The musicologist Alfred Dürr assumes that it was written already in Weimar, whereas John Eliot Gardiner shares this view only for movements 1, 4 and 7. The prescribed readings for the Sunday were taken from the Epistle to the Romans, speaking of the duties of a Christian (Romans 12:1–6), and from the Gospel of Luke, the finding in the Temple (Luke 2:41–52). The unknown poet takes the parents' search for the lost Jesus as the starting point to depict the general situation of man who lost Jesus. Movements 1 and 2 lament this loss. Movement 3 is a chorale, stanza 2 of "Jesu, meiner Seelen Wonne" by Martin Janus (or Jahn), asking Jesus to return. Movement 4 asks the same question in a personal aria. The answer is given by the bass, the vox Christi (voice of Christ), in the words of the Gospel "Wisset ihr nicht, daß ich sein muß in dem, das meines Vaters ist?" (Do you not know that I must be in that which is My Father's? Luke 2:49). The joy of the finding is expressed paraphrasing from the Song of Songs "The voice of my beloved! Behold, he comes, leaping on the mountains, skipping on the hills"(Song of Solomon 2:8). The cantata ends with stanza 6 of Christian Keymann's chorale "Meinen Jesum laß ich nicht".