Up or Down? A New Creation
Sunday 11 January 2026, The 1st Sunday of Epiphany, The Baptism of Christ
The Very Reverend Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury
Isaiah 42: 1–9
Matthew 3: 13–end
The Burgon Society describes itself as a learned society for the study of the design, history and practice of academic dress and regalia. It is named after John William Burgon, appointed Dean of our sister Cathedral of Chichester in 1876. Burgon has the distinction of being the only person to have had an academic hood pattern named after him. He has the further distinction of authoring a poem which finds its way into just about every guidebook to the Middle East. Written while he was an undergraduate thirty years before his appointment to Chichester, the poem has lived rather longer in the public memory than has his copious scholarship in defence of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. It is addressed to the ancient Nabatean city of Petra.
‘It seems no work of Man’s creative hand,
by labour wrought as wavering fancy planned;
But from the rock as if by magic grown,
eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!’
Burgon had never visited the place he describes as ‘a rose-red city half as old as time’. Petra’s legend alone was sufficient to draw poetry from him. The site has a similarly breathless impact on two other – although rather different – academics, who had the advantage of seeing Petra for themselves, having traversed the narrow canyon that the Bedouin call the ‘Siq’ on horseback. The sight reduces Indiana Jones and his father (played memorably by Sean Connery) to reverent silence.
One of the architectural motifs that appears above many of Petra’s rock-hewn tombs is that of steps. They are carved into the red sandstone above many a doorway, one flight stretching upwards to the left and one to the right. When Heather and I visited last year, our guide assured us that these were indicative of the Nabataeans’ beliefs about the afterlife – they were what we might call the original Stairways to Heaven. They promised to the deceased and to their mourners that beyond the grave a celestial ascent beckoned. We spent two days in Petra and saw all the sights by climbing an awful lot of steps in blistering heat. If the climb up to Paradise is half as arduous then I’m not sure I’ll attempt it…
But you haven’t come to hear about what I did on my holiday. Petra plays a vital but unsung role in the story of John, whose Baptism of Jesus the Church celebrates today. John’s ministry comes to an abrupt and violent end when he rebukes Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great and tetrarch of Galilee, for marrying Herodias, his brother’s wife (his brother was also called Herod, by the way, which keeps things simple…or doesn’t). To marry Herodias, Herod Antipas had to divorce his first wife, and his first wife was the daughter of Aretas IV, the Nabatean king, who reigned from and was buried at Petra. When Jesus comes from Galilee to John at the Jordan not so very far away, to the south of the Dead Sea, those steps were being carved into the rock.
If our guide was right (and I’ve read nothing that contradicts him) then Aretas and his people believed that after death they would – literally or metaphorically – ascend the steps. In the scene described by Saint Matthew the reverse happens, for as Jesus comes up from the water he sees ‘…the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him’. Jesus does not clamber up the desert rockface to find God on the lofty peak: God comes down to the river valley to find him as he emerges from the water. The good news embodied in the tiny child of Bethlehem is embodied afresh in the Spirit’s descent: God is with his people, but at the River Jordan the overwhelming awesomeness of that ‘with-ness’ is definitively revealed.
At Christmas parallels were drawn in this Cathedral (and doubtless in many other churches) between the opening of Saint John’s Gospel – ‘In the beginning was the Word’ – and the opening of Genesis, the very first book of the Hebrew Bible – ‘In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth’. Saint John is consciously aligning his claims about Jesus with the historic faith of his ancestors: there was a beginning, and now, in Jesus, there is a new beginning. Saint Matthew’s account of the Baptism pushes this analogy still further. In his very next phrase, the author of Genesis (almost certainly not Moses, despite Dean Burgon’s best efforts to the contrary) writes of the ‘ruach’ of God hovering over the waters of chaos. ‘Ruach’ means ‘wind’ or ‘spirit’. So: in the very beginning the spirit of God hovers, bird-like, over the waters. Now, in the Baptism of Jesus, the Spirit of God descends, dove-like, upon the waters. Isaiah encapsulates the meaning of the moment in these words of God, ‘See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare’.
John is understandably reluctant to baptize Jesus. The baptism he offers is a baptism of repentance, and he knows that alone among humankind the one who reveals the new creation has no need of repentance. But Jesus insists that he should be baptized; he insists because he knows that his Baptism is not all about him. It’s not the opening of the gate at the bottom of the rock-hewn steps, allowing him to begin the lonely climb up to glory. His Baptism is the public declaration that God has descended those steps and made his home among us – among all of us, in a new creation into which you and I have been baptized. The world may look like a chaotic and brutal playground for powerful men, and the temptation to seek our souls’ ascension on high to solitary but perpetual bliss is strong. But in the new creation God is with us, with us here, with us inescapably, and with us everlastingly.
The Bible’s account of the feud between Herod Antipas and John ends with the latter’s judicial murder in a prison cell. But Herod lived to regret divorcing his Nabataean princess. Her father invaded his realm in revenge. Antipas survived only because his Roman patrons intervened on his behalf, and two years later even they turned against him and forced him into exile.
If Antipas is remembered for his faithlessness and his cruelty then you and I, inheritors and citizens of the new creation, are called to something different. Not to climbing above the pain and fear that surround us, but to that of which Isaiah speaks. ‘I am the LORD…I have given you as a light to the nations… I have given you to open the eyes of the blind…I have given you to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon’. The light of God and the liberty of all God’s people: it is as this and for this that we are to be known at the beginning of this New Year.