Warrnambool Presbyterian Church Good Friday Sermon:
Luke 12:54-13:5
Luke 12:54–13:5 offered extraordinary promise for a Good Friday sermon. Few Easter passages naturally gather together such severe and searching themes as judgment, repentance, divine wrath, human guilt, catastrophe, reconciliation, and the urgency of salvation before it is too late.
The atmosphere of the passage is apocalyptic from the outset. Jesus speaks not of comfort but of fire. He speaks of division, judgment, imprisonment, and punishment, and sudden unexpected calamity. He rebukes the crowds because they can interpret the weather while remaining blind to uncertainty of “the present time.” And those calamities then come as public catastrophes: Pilate slaughtering worshippers in the temple, the tower of Siloam collapsing upon eighteen unsuspecting people, and Christ’s repeated warning: “unless you repent, you too will all perish.”
This is not merely a passage about suffering. It is a passage about untimely judgment.
These signs that Jesus speaks of are not fundamentally signs that life is “sour.” The signs are warnings that eschatological judgment is coming and therefore sinners must repent. The courtroom imagery makes this unmistakable. Christ speaks of the adversary, the magistrate, the judge, the officer, the prison, and the punishment. The hearer is not merely confronted with the unpleasantness of a broken world but with impending accountability before God.
For a Good Friday sermon, this text could scarcely be richer. The Rev. Ben Johnson, senior pastor at Warrnambool Presbyterian Church since 2008, was truly being modest when he said this passage may seem unusual for a Good Friday sermon. It naturally presses toward the deepest logic of Calvary itself. Why does Christ die? What judgment stands over mankind? Why must sinners repent? What eternal punishment does Christ bear? Why is the new birth absolutely necessary? In many ways, Luke 13 is more penetrating and offers greater scope for natural experiential application than some of the traditional passion narratives because it interprets catastrophe and death judicially. Christ does not merely lament suffering. He warns of perishing.
To the sermon’s credit, it moves further toward these realities than many of the other sermons in this Easter series. Judgment is mentioned repeatedly. Punishment is retained. Repentance is not erased. Christ’s death is described substitutionally. One of the sermon’s strongest lines is: “Easter is this time to be reconciled with God.” That sentence suddenly lifts the sermon into genuinely apostolic territory. Reconciliation is a far weightier category than emotional healing or existential comfort. Reconciliation assumes estrangement, hostility, judgment, and offended holiness. It raises unavoidable questions: Why must we be reconciled? Who stands offended? What judgment must be removed? What happens if reconciliation never occurs?
Yet the sermon repeatedly softens every sharp edge the questions raised by this passage presents.
The controlling “sweet and sour” motif becomes emblematic of the problem. The catastrophe of sin and the horror of judgment are steadily translated into the language of unpleasantness, alienation, and fractured experience. The signs of Luke 13 become signs that “things aren’t right here” rather than warnings that sinners stand beneath impending judgment. In Luke itself, the movement is catastrophe, judgment, repentance, salvation. In the sermon, the movement repeatedly becomes sourness, alienation, reconciliation, hope.
The problem is not that the sermon says false things. Alienation from God is real. Human suffering does reveal that the world lies under the curse of sin. But Luke 13 is pressing toward something far more severe than the observation that life feels painful or broken. Christ is warning of divine judgment.
This is why the repeated “sweet and sour” language struggles to bear the theological weight of Good Friday. “Sweet and sour” belongs naturally to the vocabulary of everyday emotional experience, even culinary experience. It evokes flavour, mood, and disappointment. But Scripture’s categories for Calvary are curse, condemnation, propitiation, blood, judgment, and a sin-bearing Saviour receiving the full wrath of God. Good Friday is not fundamentally the story of Jesus entering the sourness of human existence. It is the story of the Son of God bearing divine judgment against sin.
The sermon repeatedly approaches this reality but hesitates to fully articulate it. This softening begins from the opening moments. The extended reflections on public holidays, Australia Day, Anzac Day, fuel prices, Iran’s need to build “a free and flourishing society” diffuse the terrifying urgency of Christ’s warnings. Luke 13 scarcely requires contemporary embellishment. Jesus already speaks with prophetic immediacy. The biblical text already contains its own vivid illustrations: bloodshed, collapsed towers, sudden death, and divine warning that are acknowledged but not driven into the conscience.
Even the use of the C. S. Lewis quotation subtly shifts the emphasis. Lewis’s statement that God “shouts in our pains” is absorbed into the sermonic framework of “sourness.” But in Luke 13, suffering is not primarily a reminder that the world is difficult. It is a warning that judgment is coming and therefore sinners must repent.
The sermon’s anthropology likewise remains moderated throughout. Humanity “turned away from God” and “thought that we could do it better our way.” We “make this grab for self-determination.” Such language implies rebellion, but only cautiously. The sermon never plainly declares that mankind rebels against God, stands condemned before Him, and is spiritually dead in Adam. Sin becomes alienation more than guilt. Estrangement more than condemnation. Self-direction more than rebellion.
This becomes especially significant because the sermon entirely avoids explicit mention of hell. Judgment is repeatedly referenced, but the eternal condition from which sinners must be saved remains unnamed. Christ warns: “unless you repent, you too will all perish,” yet the sermon never unfolds what that perishing means. Eternal punishment, everlasting condemnation, and hell, remain hidden just beyond the sermonic horizon.
And once hell disappears, the necessity of the new birth inevitably weakens with it. “Sweet and sour” are inadequate categories to carry the weight of the necessity to be born again.
Historically, Reformed Good Friday preaching held together death in Adam, eternal judgment, divine wrath, substitutionary atonement, and the necessity of sovereign regeneration. But here the judicial realities repeatedly soften into relational and therapeutic categories. Christ’s death is framed chiefly as ending alienation and restoring relationship. Yet reconciliation is never deeply rooted in propitiation. The sermon never fully explains that reconciliation becomes possible because divine wrath has been satisfied through Christ bearing judgment in the sinner’s place.
That omission profoundly affects the sermon’s presentation of faith itself. The courtroom imagery in Luke 12:57-59 provided the perfect opportunity to explain the debt owed before God, the impossibility of satisfying divine justice, and Christ bearing condemnation in the place of sinners. Instead, the hearer is invited to “come before God and level with Him.” That phrase perfectly captures the sermon’s central weakness. It belongs to the language of counselling culture and therapeutic openness rather than the atmosphere of Luke 13. Scripture’s categories here are repent, flee judgment, cry for mercy, and be reconciled before the Judge.
“Level with Him” suggests honesty and emotional transparency to the modern ear. But biblical repentance involves sinners falling before a holy God confessing guilt and pleading for mercy through Christ crucified.
This is why the sermon feels simultaneously serious and restrained. It is stronger than many contemporary Easter sermons. It genuinely preserves judgment, punishment, repentance, and reconciliation. It repeatedly approaches the threshold of historic Christian preaching. Yet every time the text sharpens, the sermon cushions the blow. Judgment becomes sourness, rebellion becomes self-determination, wrath becomes alienation, repentance becomes openness, and faith becomes relational response more than desperate reliance upon Christ bearing divine judgment in the sinner’s place.
The fundamental question raised by this Good Friday sermon is not whether it mentions judgment, punishment, repentance, or reconciliation. It does all of those things more clearly than many Good Friday sermons. The deeper question is whether the sermon’s controlling “sweet and sour” framework can sustain the terrifying urgency of Luke 12–13 itself.
For in Christ’s own preaching, the signs of the times are not ultimately signs that life is difficult or alienated. They are signs that judgment is coming and therefore sinners must repent. The collapsing tower, the slaughtered worshippers, the courtroom imagery, the prison warning, and Christ’s repeated declaration: “unless you repent, you too will all perish” all press toward one overwhelming reality: the old creation stands under judgment.
And this is precisely where the New Birth in Exile series presses its concern. In the New Testament, the resurrection of Christ announces that the new creation has already begun while the old creation is passing away beneath divine judgment. Easter therefore is not merely the promise of relational healing within a sour world. It is God’s declaration that Adam’s world is perishing and that sinners must be born again into the new creation inaugurated in Christ or burn along with this old creation.
This sermon repeatedly approaches that horizon. It speaks more seriously about judgment and repentance than many modern Easter sermons. Yet each time the text sharpens toward wrath, condemnation, and eternal judgment, the sermon softens the edge into the language of sourness, alienation, and relational openness. The result is that the necessity of the new birth never emerges with the apocalyptic urgency that Luke 13 itself appears designed to produce.
The final question therefore remains: does the “sweet and sour” motif truly carry the weight of Christ’s warning? Or does the language of the sermon ultimately soften the very signs of the times that Jesus Himself intended to awaken sinners to the terrifying necessity of repentance, reconciliation, and new birth before the old creation finally passes away beneath the judgment of God?
A copy of the full sermon is available at The Reformed Pastor YouTube channel
More articles in this series are available at The New Birth in Exile
