The Darebin Presbyterian Church's Good Friday sermon’s central assertion is simple and memorable: “Jesus goes into the darkness so that we can come into the light.”
This theme is used throughout the sermon. Drawn from the darkness that fell at the crucifixion in Mark 15:33, the theme of light and darkness has some biblical associations.
Darkness may signify divine judgment, alienation, evil, and death; light may signify God’s purity, revelation, salvation, and life. Scripture itself employs such imagery.
Yet an image, however biblical, cannot bear more doctrinal weight than the text and the wider canon allow. In this sermon, the light-and-darkness contrast is made to carry the whole explanation of human need, Christ’s atoning work, conversion, and Christian discipleship.
As a result, vital biblical categories, particularly the Scripture's anthropology, are displaced or obscured.
To be really blunt here, the most serious defect is that the sermon does not identify its hearers as sinners. It speaks of “moral darkness,” “spiritual darkness,” corruption, and people with with failings, hidden thoughts and feelings, “our fallenness,” “our moral failure,” and “our rebellion.” Some of these expressions are true as far as they go. Human beings do commit moral failures; they do rebel; our hearts are corrupt. But these descriptions do not by themselves say what Scripture says about us: we are sinners.
That distinction is not verbal fastidiousness. “Sinfulness,” “moral failure,” and “rebellion” describe what people do. “Sinners” identifies what people are before God: fallen in Adam, corrupt at the root, guilty in themselves, spiritually dead, and unable to reconcile themselves to God. Paul does not merely say that people sometimes act in darkness. He says that all “have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23), that “through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin” (Rom. 5:12), and that people are “dead in trespasses and sins” and “by nature children of wrath” (Eph. 2:1–3). The biblical problem is not simply that darkness is within us or around us. It is that we are guilty sinners before the holy God.
The sermon’s early description of the human condition is therefore inadequate. It speaks of the world as a place of “corruption and danger,” and of hearts containing “corruption,” “failings,” and thoughts and feelings people would rather conceal. Such language may awaken a general sense of human defectiveness, but it does not bring the conscience beneath the divine verdict. Hidden feelings are not necessarily sinful. Failure can suggest limitation, weakness, or unmet aspiration. “Imperfect people,” the sermon’s later description of humanity, is weaker still. Imperfection may be the language of people who need improvement; sinners are people who deserve condemnation and require redemption.
Early in the sermon, we are told that God will judge darkness and that hearers need rescue lest they be “judged and consumed along with the darkness.” Such statements expose loose handling of Scripture. Scripture explicitly and repeatedly says that God judges sin, sinful deeds, sinners, wickedness, and the world because of sin. It also says that God has already judged sin in historical acts of judgment and, supremely, that sin was condemned in connection with Christ's atoning work: “God… condemned sin in the flesh” (Rom. 8:3). Yet no supporting text was given that straightforwardly says “God judges darkness” as the object of divine judgment. The sermon later refers to God’s anger at human rebellion. Yet the controlling metaphor remains impersonal. Darkness becomes a thing from which people must escape, almost a realm that surrounds and inhabits them, rather than the holy God’s judgment upon guilty sinners. The consequence is subtle but serious: the sermon portrays people less as rebels standing under God’s righteous sentence and more as persons trapped in a bleak and dark condition.
Mark’s report that darkness came over the land from noon until three o’clock should be treated with reverence. The darkness is not decorative atmosphere. In the prophetic Scriptures, cosmic darkness may accompany the day of the Lord and divine judgment. Mark places it over the crucified Christ, and then records his cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The darkness signals the dreadful reality that the sinless Son is bearing the judgment due to his people.
The sermon correctly recognizes this judicial dimension. It says that Christ bears God’s wrath, that sins are punished, that the curse deserved by his people is borne by him, and that God’s just anger is satisfied through Christ’s punishment. These are important and true elements of penal substitution. The sermon is not merely sentimental about the cross. It does speak of wrath, sacrifice, judgment, reconciliation, and forgiveness.
Nevertheless, its account of the cross remains weakened by its deficient anthropology. “Jesus is bearing God’s wrath for our sinfulness” is not yet the full biblical explanation of the atonement. The question is not only whether Christ bears wrath for impersonal “sinfulness,” but whether he stands in the place of sinners, bearing their guilt and curse as their covenantal representative. Scripture says that God “made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21). The sinless Christ did not become morally corrupt. He was made sin in the judicial and representative sense: the guilt of his people was imputed to him, and he bore its penal consequence. In him, believing sinners receive the righteousness they do not possess.
Without this clear identification of the hearers as sinners, the statement that “our darkness is placed on Jesus” becomes theologically meaningless. Darkness may be a useful image, but it cannot replace guilt, imputation, condemnation, satisfaction, and substitution. Christ does not merely enter an abstract darkness so that troubled people may enter a brighter light filled existence. He, the righteous one, suffers for the unrighteous, “that he might bring us to God” (1 Pet. 3:18). He is cursed so that those under the curse may be redeemed (Gal. 3:13). He dies for the ungodly (Rom. 5:6). The gospel is not rescue from darkness conceived chiefly as inward disorder; it is God’s gracious justification and deliverance of condemned sinners through the blood and righteousness of Christ.
The sermon also overextends the darkness metaphor in its explanation of the temple curtain. It says that access to God was difficult because “God is light and we are darkness.” There is truth in the contrast between divine holiness and human evil. Yet the curtain chiefly testified to the problem of sinful people approaching a holy God and to the need for priestly, sacrificial mediation. The torn curtain announces that Christ’s death has opened access to God because he has fulfilled what the sacrificial system anticipated. Hebrews explains that believers enter the holy places “by the blood of Jesus” and through “the new and living way” opened through his flesh (Heb. 10:19–22). The decisive categories are holiness, sin, blood, sacrifice, mediation, cleansing, and access—not simply the movement from darkness to light.
The sermon’s handling of Christ’s cry of dereliction is also imprecise. It helpfully insists that the Trinity cannot be divided, but then says that Christ’s human nature experienced “separation from God.” This formulation is unstable and has a Nestorian-sounding tendency . Christ’s humanity is not a separate person who can be detached from God. The eternal communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was not broken at Calvary. The Father did not cease to love the Son, nor was the Son severed from the divine life.
What must be said is that the incarnate Son, in his mediatorial office and according to his human suffering, endured the judicial abandonment, curse, and wrath due to his people. He truly entered the God-forsakenness that sin deserves, while the indivisible unity of the Triune God remained inviolate. This preserves both the terror of the cross and the truth of the Trinity.
The sermon’s invitation similarly reflects the larger weakness. Hearers are told, “All you have to do is turn away from your dark ways and put your trust in Jesus.” Repentance and faith are indispensable. But the language suggests that the fundamental issue is a person’s willingness to alter direction. It does not explain that sinners are spiritually dead and that repentance and faith arise from the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. Nor does it define faith as receiving and resting upon Christ alone for salvation.
The later appeal to imitate Joseph of Arimathea intensifies the problem. Courageous and public allegiance to Christ is commendable, but the sermon moves quickly from Christ’s suffering to repeated questions about whether hearers are willing to live differently, take risks, and follow Joseph’s example. Christian obedience is thereby insufficiently grounded in union with Christ, justification by grace, and the Spirit’s enabling power. The gospel does indeed produce a new life. But Christ does not die so that morally imperfect people may become more courageous. He dies and rises to save sinners, reconcile them to God, and make them new by his Spirit.
In a nutshell, the sermon’s central gospel logic is substantially sound, but its application and doctrinal precision are weaker than its atonement theology . The sermon contains genuine gospel elements, especially in its affirmation of divine wrath and substitutionary punishment. Yet its governing light-and-darkness dichotomy is pressed beyond its proper function. The imagery is allowed to replace the biblical diagnosis of the human condition and to soften the necessary proclamation that people are sinners before God and must be born again. A stronger sermon on Mark 15 would retain the darkness as a sign of judgment, but would plainly declare that the crucified Christ bears that judgment in the place of guilty sinners. Only then can the invitation to repent, believe, and follow Christ rest upon the full gravity and glory of the gospel.
