Before we begin this week’s Sunday Sermon, this time looking at The Last of Us, I’ve just gotta add this little introduction to it.

When this game came out in June 2013, it knocked Red Dead Redemption off the top of my all-time list. Red Dead had been sitting at number one for three years, and I didn’t think anything was going to move it. Then Naughty Dog released a game about a smuggler and a fourteen-year-old girl crossing a broken America, and within about fifteen hours I was a different person about it. It is the best game I have ever played narratively and the gameplay was top notch too. It still is.

I say that so you understand where I’m coming from when I tell you that what Joel does at the end of that game is one of the most theologically interesting moments in the history of the medium. Not because it’s clean. Because it isn’t.

If you haven’t finished The Last of Us, stop here and go do that first. Everything below is spoilers, and more importantly, you owe it to yourself to experience the ending without knowing what’s coming.

Still here? Good.

Joel Miller kills everyone in that hospital. He kills the guards. He kills the surgeon who was about to operate on Ellie. He shoots Marlene, the leader of the Fireflies, twice — once when she’s blocking his way out and then again when she’s on the ground bleeding and begs him to let her live. His reason for the second shot is four words: “You’d just come after her.” And then he puts Ellie in a car, drives away, and lies to her face about what happened when she wakes up.

The game doesn’t let you off the hook about any of this. It shows you the surgery room. It shows you the unconscious fourteen-year-old on the table. It shows you Joel’s face when he makes the choice. And it shows you the lie at the end, and Ellie’s face when she hears it, a face that, to me, suggests she already knows.

Here is my position, and I held it in 2013 when I reviewed the game and I hold it now: Joel did the right thing.

That isn’t always the popular take in every corner of the Internet, and I maybe understand why. The utilitarian math seems straightforward. One life for a vaccine that could save millions. Marlene says it herself in the parking garage: “It’s what she’d want. And you know it.” Maybe. Probably. Ellie wanted to help, but I don’t remember anyone every necessarily telling her she’d have to die to do it. Even so, she probably would’ve been okay with it.

But Ellie didn’t get to decide. She was unconscious on a table. The choice was made for her, and was going to be made for her, by people who were certain they were right, and history is full of atrocities committed by people who were certain they were right. She was either going to die without a choice, or live without a choice in how.

That sent me to Romans 5:6-8.

“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Paul is making a point about the nature of sacrificial love. It doesn’t wait for the person to deserve it. It doesn’t calculate the odds. It acts, at cost to itself, on behalf of someone who hasn’t earned it and can’t repay it.

Joel Miller had been dead inside for twenty years. His daughter Sarah was shot in the arms of a soldier in the first twenty minutes of the game, and whatever warmth was in him went with her. He became a smuggler, a survivor, a man who did what he had to do and didn’t ask questions about the human cost. The game shows you this version of Joel for hours before anything starts to change.

What changes it is Ellie. Specifically, the slow, grudging, and completely believable way that Joel allows himself to love her. It happens across seasons. By the time they’re standing next to each other watching giraffes walk through the ruins of Salt Lake City, you can see it on his face. He’s back. Whatever was dead in him is alive again because of this kid.

So when the Fireflies tell him Ellie has to die for a vaccine that might work, Joel’s response isn’t a calculation. It’s the same thing that drove the parable we talked about in the RDR series, the same thing that drove Abigail Marston to stand by a man she had every reason to leave. It’s love that doesn’t ask whether it’s convenient or rational or good for everyone else. It just acts.

Romans 5 says God loved us while we were still sinners. Not after we cleaned up. Not after we proved ourselves. While we were still a mess, still ungodly, still powerless. That’s the shape of the love Paul is describing; unconditional, costly, aimed at someone who hasn’t earned it.

Joel’s love for Ellie looks like that. Not because Joel is a good man. He isn’t, exactly. The game doesn’t let him be. But love of the Romans 5 variety doesn’t require the person doing the loving to be good. It requires them to act anyway.

Now we move on to the big lie.

This is where people get stuck, and I get it. Joel looks Ellie in the eye and tells her there were dozens of immune people, the Fireflies couldn’t figure out a vaccine, they’ve given up, Marlene’s dead because of the raid. All of it false. And Ellie asks him at the end, one more time, to swear it’s true. And he does.

I wrote in my original 2013 review that I think Ellie knows he’s lying. I still think that. The look on her face when she says “okay” is not the look of someone who believes what they just heard. It’s the look of someone who has decided to accept it anyway, because the alternative (knowing what Joel did, knowing the choice that was made for her, knowing she is alive because everyone else in that hospital is dead) is a weight she isn’t ready to carry yet.

The lie is an act of protection, not just self-preservation. Joel isn’t lying to save himself. He’s lying to keep Ellie from having to live with the truth of what his love cost. That doesn’t make it right. But it makes it human in a way that is hard to argue with.

Romans 5 ends by talking about how grace abounds even where sin increases. I don’t think Naughty Dog was writing a theological treatise. But the shape of what they made (a broken man whose love for a girl drives him to an act that is simultaneously terrible and completely understandable) sits right in the middle of that passage whether they meant it to or not.

Joel did what love drove him to do. It cost everyone else in that hospital everything. And the game trusts you to sit with that without telling you how to feel about it.

That’s exactly what the best scripture does too.

See you next Sunday, and we’re not done with The Last of Us yet.

Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments or over at our Vortex Effect forums.