The text of the first movement, "Jesus nahm zu sich die Zwölfe" (Jesus gathered the Twelve to Himself) is a quotation of two verses from the prescribed Gospel for the Sunday (Luke 18:31–43). The movement is a scene with different actors, narrated by the Evangelist (tenor), in which Jesus (bass, as the vox Christi or voice of Christ) and his disciples (the chorus) interact. An "ever-ascending" instrumental ritornello "evokes the image of the road of suffering embodied by going up to Jerusalem".The Evangelist begins the narration (Luke 18:31). Jesus announces his future suffering in Jerusalem, Sehet, wir gehn hinauf gen Jerusalem ("Behold, we go up to Jerusalem"). He sings, while the ritornello is played several times.After another repeat of the ritornello as an interlude, a choral fugue illustrates the reaction of the disciples, following verse 34 from the Gospel (Luke 18:34): Sie aber vernahmen der keines ("However they understood nothing").The voices are first accompanied only by the continuo, then doubled by the other instruments. Bach marks the voices in the autograph score as "concertists" for the first section and "ripienists" when the instruments come in.The movement is concluded by an instrumental postlude.The musicologist Julian Mincham notes that the fugue deviates from the "traditional alternating of tonic and dominant entries ... as a rather abstruse indication of the lack of clarity and expectation amongst the disciples, Bach is hinting at this in musical terms by having each voice enter on a different note, B-flat, F, C and G and briefly touching upon various related keys. The music is, as always, lucid and focussed but the departure from traditional fugal procedure sends a fleeting message to those who appreciate the subtleties of the musical processes".The musicologist Richard D. P. Jones points out that "the biblical narrative is set as a dramatic scena worthy of the Bach Passions" and that the "vivid drama of that movement has no real counterpart in Bach's Cycle I cantatas."