This is the third and final Sunday Sermon on Red Dead Redemption, and I’ve saved the hardest one for last.
The first week we talked about John Marston and the Prodigal Son. Last week, we talked about the Strange Man and the appointment none of us can outride. Both of those columns are about John. His guilt. His past. His reckoning. And that makes sense, because the game is, in a sense, named after him and the weight of everything he carries is what you feel in every hour of it. It’s about John’s redemption.
But there is someone else in this story who doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. Someone who is there at the beginning and there at the end and whose presence holds the entire thing together in a way that doesn’t announce itself loudly. You have to sit with the game for a while before you realize how much she matters.
Abigail Marston.
John’s wife. The woman waiting on the ranch at Beecher’s Hope while John rides across three territories doing the government’s dirty work to get his family back. The woman who raised their son largely on her own while John was running with Dutch’s gang. The woman who, when John finally comes home, doesn’t deliver a speech about everything he put her through. She just gets on with living. With him. On the land they’re trying to build something on together.
There’s a scene near the end of the game where John and Abigail are just doing chores around the ranch. Feeding animals. Fixing fences. Normal domestic life that John has never really had and is clearly not entirely comfortable with. And Abigail is patient with him in it. Not saintly-patient, not doormat-patient. Just the kind of patient that comes from a woman who made a decision a long time ago about who she was going to love and hasn’t revisited that decision regardless of the cost.
That sent me to 1 Corinthians 13.
Most people know this chapter from weddings. It gets read at ceremonies all the time, usually the King James version, and it’s beautiful language so that makes sense. But I think hearing it so often in that context has made it easy to miss how demanding it actually is. Paul isn’t describing a feeling. He’s describing a practice. A discipline. A daily choice made repeatedly under conditions that make the choice difficult.
“Love suffers long, and is kind. Love does not envy, does not parade itself, is not puffed up, does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil. Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
Reads differently when you put Abigail Marston next to it.
She suffered long. By any reasonable accounting, John Marston was not a good husband for most of their relationship. He rode with outlaws. He was absent. He made choices that put her and Jack in danger and then left her to manage the fallout. She had every right to a grievance the size of the frontier itself and the game never pretends otherwise. There are moments where you can hear the history between them in a single line of dialogue. She isn’t performing forgiveness. She just loves him, practically and stubbornly, in a way that has apparently survived things that would have ended most relationships.
She does not parade what she’s endured. She doesn’t keep score out loud. That ranch they’re building on in the epilogue before everything falls apart — she isn’t there because John earned it through the events of the game. She’s there because she was always going to be there if he came back. That was her position the whole time. The waiting was the love. The staying was the love.
Paul says love keeps no record of wrongs. That’s the line that gets me every time I read this chapter. Not because it’s inspirational, but because it’s one of the hardest things in scripture to actually do. Every one of us has a ledger somewhere. We tell ourselves we’ve forgiven things and then the ledger comes back out the next time we’re in an argument. Abigail Marston’s ledger, if she has one, is never opened in front of John. Not once that we see. She could have opened it. She had plenty to put in it. She chose not to.
I’m not holding Abigail up as a perfect character or suggesting the game is making some statement about what a wife ought to tolerate. That’s not the point. The point is that what she demonstrates across the course of that story (the long-suffering, the endurance, the refusal to let the record define the relationship) is what Paul is describing when he talks about love as a verb rather than a noun. Something you do rather than something you feel.
The ending of Red Dead Redemption hits differently when you watch it through her eyes rather than John’s. John dies protecting his family on the ground of the ranch he fought to give them. That’s heroic and it’s devastating and most people remember it as John’s moment. But Abigail outlives him by only a couple of years or so before she’s buried beside him at Beecher’s Hope. She doesn’t go on without him. The game doesn’t show you how she goes, just that she does, and not long after.
Love endures all things, Paul says. And then it ends when the thing it was enduring ends. She waited for him, and she got a year, and that was apparently enough.
I find that genuinely hard to read. I also find it one of the most honest things a video game has ever said about what it looks like when someone loves you the way Paul is describing. It doesn’t come with fanfare. It doesn’t ask for credit. It just shows up, does the work, and outlasts almost everything except the person it was for.
Three weeks on one game is a lot. But Red Dead Redemption is one of the deeper, more meaningful games out there. There isn’t another game I can think of that is this loaded with things worth sitting with, besides of course Red Dead Redemption 2 and the tale of Arthur Morgan. For now, we’ll pump the brakes on the Red Dead franchise, but you know it won’t be long before we eventually get around to old Arthur. I’ll be back next Sunday (hopefully) with something different.
Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments or over at our Vortex Effect forums.
