State Funeral of John Laws

The State Funeral of John Laws: Sermon by Michael Jensen 20 November, 2025.    

The sermon for John Laws’s state funeral deserves to be recognised with generous appreciation. It was delivered in a charged national moment, before a largely secular audience grieving for a man who shaped Australian culture for decades.

In that environment the preacher, The Rev Dr Michael Jensen, achieved something rare: a eulogy that honoured the deceased without mythologising him, and a homily that gently introduced listeners to the person of Jesus Christ without tripping cultural alarms or alienating mourners.

The central metaphor, drawing a line between the Voice of God in John 1 and the iconic radio voice of Golden Tonsils, was not a contrivance but a stroke of pastoral imagination. It invited listeners to consider that the familiarity they felt with Laws’s voice was a faint echo of a deeper, older Voice that speaks creation into being. That voice speaks grace into human sorrow.

This weaving together of national affection and divine revelation was dignified, human, and quietly theological. Yet when we consider a biblical analogue for preaching Christ in a culturally prestigious yet spiritually indifferent setting, the Areopagus scene in Acts 17 becomes instructive. Paul stands before the intellectual elite of Athens, acknowledging their culture, referencing their poets, and respectfully engaging their worldview. But he also brings the message to a decisive point, naming the risen Christ as judge and calling all people everywhere to repent.

Paul’s tone is not harsh. His argument is not tribal. His manner is not confrontational. The call to repent appears not as a scolding command but as a natural relational consequence of having met the true God who made the world, who gives life, and who now draws near offering comfort through Jesus.

Jensen’s sermon already contained the seeds for such a moment. He spoke of Jesus shouldering guilt, carrying our regrets, and taking on our death. It portrayed him as the one in whom kindness is pure rather than shadowed. It described God as inviting the wounded and weary home. In fact, much of the emotional logic of the sermon already aligns with the biblical dynamic of repentance understood as turning, returning, or coming home.

The sermon, by highlighting Laws’s honest recognition of his flaws, prepared the ground for a wider confession that every Australian needs to recognise their flaws too. Death is inevitable. Had the Areopagus pattern been allowed to flower in one more carefully placed movement, the sermon could have gently risen from a beautiful eulogy to a fuller proclamation.

A single sentence could have provided this lift without disturbing the atmosphere of honour, grief, and national unity. Something such as: The Voice from above invites each of us to confess our perceived flaws to Him. To receive the comfort and forgiveness we long for and cannot find elsewhere.

Such a line would not have condemned the hearers; it would have dignified them with the truth that the God who entered our world in Christ calls all people home. Its tone would harmonise with the broader theme of kindness, which Laws himself championed, and which the sermon rightly placed at the centre of Christian grace.

Repentance, in this Areopagus sense, is not a harsh interruption but the natural completion of the gospel’s logic. The kindness of God becomes clearer when it is shown to meet real human suffering. The invitation of Christ becomes more compelling when it is understood as a call to return. Afterall, it is never a demand to reform oneself anyway.

The resurrection, which Paul used as the culminating proof of God’s appointed Judge may have been a step too far in this funeral. I can’t comment on that. But had the preacher consider it possible, it would have given the sermon a gentle eschatological horizon: a reminder that the Voice from above is not silenced by death.

With such additions the sermon would remain exactly what it already was, a gracious tribute in the public square, yet it would also become what every gospel message longs to be, an invitation to hear the living Christ and turn toward him in hope. Having said all of this, we can give thanks to God, that the The Rev Dr Michael Jensen was bold to mention Jesus Christ when many of us would have shrunk from doing so.

The text of the sermon may be read here: Homily for John Laws.