Good Friday: this is not just a normal day

Good Friday in our house looks something like this: hot cross buns in the morning, sometimes a church service, and then the day moving along much like any other public holiday. The boys are fed and content. The house is comfortable. Nobody is suffering.

And that’s the problem.

I’ve had a growing sense that we’re not marking this day the way it deserves. Not because we need more religious activity, but because something of enormous weight happened on this day—something that my sons are receiving the full benefit of without, I suspect, feeling much of the cost. I’m not sure I always feel it either. And that troubles me.

The problem with growing up in the light

My four sons have followed Jesus for as long as they can remember. They have never known life without the gospel, without the church, without the assurance of forgiveness. That is a genuine gift—one I prayed for and one I’m grateful for every day.

But I came to faith at 21 after six years of wandering in the dark. I know what it feels like to carry guilt with nowhere to put it. I know what it is to be well and truly lost—not as a theological category, but as something I actually lived. And I know the specific relief of the night I understood, for the first time, that Christ had already dealt with all of it.

My sons don’t have that ‘before’ picture. They have the light but not the memory of the darkness. I don’t want them to go through the darkness—I would never wish that on them. But I do want them to feel the weight of what the light cost. And I’m not sure our Good Fridays are doing that work.

They think this is just normal

There’s a parallel in our home that I’ve been thinking about. My sons live well. They are clothed, fed, housed, educated and cared for. They have never had to worry about any of it. From where they stand, this is simply how life is—it’s normal, it’s always been there, and it doesn’t require much thought.

What they don’t see is what it costs. The work behind it, the decisions, the sacrifices—and the simpler upbringing I had that means I know exactly what the alternative looks like. They receive the provision without knowing the price, and so in some sense they can’t fully appreciate what they have.

Forgiveness, peace with God, adoption into his family, the hope of resurrection—all of it can start to feel the same way. Normal. Background. Expected. Just how things are. But none of it is normal. Every single part of it was purchased at a cost so great that we should never be able to sit with it casually.

What actually happened on Good Friday

Isaiah saw it coming seven hundred years before it happened:

‘Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.’ (Isaiah 53:4–6)

This is the foundation. On the cross, Christ did not simply die as a good man or a moral example. He bore the specific weight of specific sins—mine, my sons’, yours—and took the punishment that belonged to us. Theologians call this penal substitution, but the idea is not complicated: he stood in our place and took what we deserved. It is the most costly act of love in history. Paul puts it plainly in Romans: ‘But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Romans 5:8).

While we were still sinners. Not after we had cleaned ourselves up or found our way back. While we were lost, while we were hostile, while we were nowhere near deserving it. That is what my sons need to understand—and what I need to keep understanding myself.

And consider what it cost the Father. I am a father of four sons. I would give almost anything for any one of them. The thought of giving one up—deliberately, willingly, for people who didn’t yet love him—is more than I can take in. Every parent reading this will understand that instinct. And yet that is precisely what God did. Good Friday is not only the story of a Son’s obedience. It is the story of a Father’s sacrifice.

I slip too

This isn’t only a problem I’m identifying in my sons. It’s mine as well.

I know the before and after. I felt the relief of forgiveness as a real, physical thing on the night I first understood what Christ had done for me. But that was more than two decades ago, and life has a way of filling the space where gratitude used to sit. Work, family, routine, responsibility—the ordinary weight of a normal week—means that I can go long stretches without stopping to feel the cost of what I’ve been given.

Good Friday is the day the church sets aside to stop. To sit with the cross and not rush past it. To feel, before we celebrate the resurrection, the full weight of what makes Easter Sunday possible.

I don’t think I’ve been doing that well. And if I’m not taking time to feel the weight of the cross, my sons certainly aren’t learning it from me. The same is true for all of us as parents—our children are watching how we treat this day.

Marking the day differently

I’m not suggesting that Christian families need a formal program or a solemn liturgy at the kitchen table—though there is nothing wrong with those things. What I am suggesting is that Good Friday deserves more than a public holiday and hot cross buns.

For our family, it starts with church—gathering with God’s people on the day his Son died seems like the right place to be. But beyond that, I want to make space for the cross to land at home. That might mean reading Isaiah 53 together after breakfast. It might mean sitting with my older sons and asking them what they actually think happened on Good Friday—not to test them, but to find out. It might mean telling them, again, something of my own story—what life felt like before Christ, and what it meant to understand that his death was for me. Every family will find its own way into the day. But the question worth asking—for every parent, mother or father—is simply this: are our children learning from us that Good Friday matters?

The goal isn’t to manufacture sorrow or perform grief. The goal is gratitude—real, considered gratitude for a death that should never feel ordinary.

To my sons, on Good Friday

You have grown up receiving something you didn’t earn and couldn’t buy. The forgiveness of your sins, peace with the God who made you, a place in his family—all of it was paid for before you were born, by someone who knew you and loved you before you knew him.

Good Friday is the day we stop and feel the cost of that. Not to feel guilty, but to feel grateful. There is a difference between the two, and it matters.

This is not just a normal day. Nothing about what happened on this day was normal. And the fact that we are sitting here, together, on the other side of it—that is everything.

—

Dan Connor is married to Harriet and together they are raising four sons. He is an ordained Anglican minister, but is currently working as a Political Advisor at NSW Parliament House.

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