It can probably go without saying, but I’m not a pastor, a theologian, or a biblical scholar. I’m just someone who enjoys playing video games, happens to be Christian, likes writing, and started noticing a long time ago that the stories that hit the hardest in gaming for me always seemed to mirror something much older than the medium.
That’s what the Sunday Sermon is. Every week (hopefully, we all know how that goes around here) I want to take a game that I enjoy and find the scripture that was always hiding inside it. Sometimes it’ll be obvious. Sometimes it’ll take some digging. Either way, my goal isn’t to preach at you. It’s to have a conversation. If you’re a person of faith, maybe this helps you see a game differently. If you’re not, maybe it helps you see the Bible differently. Or maybe you just think it’s an interesting exercise like I do.
There is really only one game I could ever start a series like this with, and it’s probably my all-time favorite game.
Red Dead Redemption came out in 2010, and before it ever released I was instantly hooked on it. The information videos Rockstar would pump out for this game created so much hype in my head and the game actually delivered on it. Playing it in 2010 was an absolutely amazing experience. But what I didn’t fully appreciate then was that I was playing one of the most honest stories about sin, guilt, and the desperate hope of a second chance that gaming had ever produced. John Marston isn’t a hero in the traditional sense. He’s a former outlaw, a man with blood on his hands from his years riding with Dutch van der Linde’s gang (which at this point we didn’t have the full details of), and when the game begins, the government has him by the throat. They have his wife Abigail and his son Jack. Do what we say, bring in your old gang, and you get your family back. You get to be something other than what you were.
The whole game is John Marston trying to earn his way back to who he wants to be.
That’s the tension Rockstar built the entire experience around, and it’s what makes it so uncomfortable in the best possible way. You’re doing terrible things, sometimes, in the name of becoming a better man. There’s a scene early on where a stranger asks John why he does what he does and John says something like, “I’m trying to make up for my past.” It sounds simple. But the weight of that sentence carries every hour of that game, unless of course you play Marston as a true outlaw (but that’s you, not really the character in the story Rockstar was telling).
Luke 15:11-32. The Parable of the Prodigal Son.
If you’re not familiar, a young man demands his inheritance early from his father, runs off, burns through everything, ends up desperate and working in a field feeding pigs while he himself is starving. And then it says he “came to himself.” He decided to go home. Not because he deserved anything. He didn’t have a real plan. But, he remembered his father. He rehearsed what he was going to say on the walk home. He was going to tell his father he wasn’t worthy to be called his son anymore. He was going to request to be made like one of his dad’s servants. That was going to be enough to go home.
And his father sees him coming from a long way off and runs to him. Doesn’t wait for the speech. Throws a robe on him. Kills the fatted calf. The son who was lost is found.
John Marston never stops rehearsing what he’s going to say when he gets back to his family. You can feel it in every mission. He is meticulous about the distance between who he was and who he needs to be, and he measures that distance constantly. The Bureau tells him he can have his freedom when the job is done, and he holds onto that the way the prodigal son held onto the memory of his father’s house. He knows he doesn’t deserve it. He says as much, repeatedly. But he keeps walking toward it anyway.
What Rockstar did with that ending I won’t spell out in full because if you haven’t played it, (which after 16-years, you need to) but I’ll say this: the resolution of John Marston’s story isn’t a triumphant return. It’s a sacrifice. And it lands the way it does because the whole game has been about one man deciding that the people he loves are worth more than his own survival. Worth more than getting to enjoy the redemption he worked so hard for.
That’s not far from what the parable is actually about, if you think on it long enough. The older brother in the story is furious that the father welcomed the prodigal home without punishment. He tells his father, I have been here the whole time, I followed every rule, and you never threw a party for me. And the father’s answer is one of the most quietly devastating lines in scripture: “Son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” The point isn’t that bad behavior gets rewarded. The point is that the father’s love was never conditional to begin with. The son who left didn’t earn his way back. He was just received.
John Marston doesn’t get to enjoy what he earned. But his son Jack does. His wife does, for at least a few years. And when you pick the game back up after the ending and walk around as Jack Marston in a world that his father bled to give him, you feel that weight differently. The sacrifice wasn’t pointless. The redemption was real. It just didn’t belong to John.
That’s a hard truth. The prodigal son came home and got the party. John Marston built the home for his family and didn’t get to stay. But both stories end in the same place: someone who was lost being found, and someone who loved them paying a price they didn’t have to pay.
That’s enough for the first Sunday Sermon, but we’re not done with Red Dead Redemption yet. We’ll be revisiting it over the next couple of editions. See you next week.
The Sunday Sermon #2 is now available and ask the question Who is the Strange Man in Red Dead Redemption?
Drop your thoughts in the comments or come find me on the Vortex Effect forums. I’d like to know which game you’d want to see featured in this column.
