The Sunday Sermon #5: The Last of Us Ellie’s Survivor Guilt and Psalm 22

There’s a moment near the very end of The Last of Us, right before the credits roll, where Joel finally talks to Ellie about Sarah while they walk back toward Jackson. He opens up about his daughter in a way he hasn’t allowed himself to all game, and during it, he tells Ellie that Sarah would have liked her. It’s the most vulnerable Joel has been about his grief in fifteen hours of gameplay, and it lands because you’ve watched him keep that wound sealed shut since the opening minutes.

Then Ellie asks him to swear that everything he told her about the Fireflies was true.

That’s where the first game ends. With a lie, a girl who probably already knows it’s a lie, and a silence hanging between them that neither of them is ready to confront honestly. It’s one of the things we talked about in last week’s column.

But if you want to understand what Ellie is really carrying underneath that quiet “okay,” you have to go to The Last of Us: Left Behind, the DLC in the original game and included in all the remasterings of the game.

Riley was Ellie’s best friend and roommate at the FEDRA school. One night, the two of them snuck out together and spent their final hours wandering through an abandoned mall, trying to hold onto one last piece of normal life before the world took it away again. They laughed, played arcade games, danced, explored empty stores, and for a few hours got to pretend they were just kids.

Then they both got bitten.

There’s a terrible tenderness to the scene that follows. They already know what infection means. They’ve seen it happen to countless other people. So they sit together in the dark and decide to wait it out side by side.

Riley turns.

Ellie doesn’t.

And Ellie has been carrying that fact ever since, like a question she cannot stop asking.

Why her and not Riley? Why her and not Tess, who died getting her out of Boston? Why her and not Sam, the little boy she watched turn in a hotel room before Henry shot him and then himself moments later?

Survivor’s guilt always turns into the same question eventually: why am I still here when they aren’t?

That brought me to Psalm 22.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? I cry out by day, but you do not answer; by night, but I find no rest.”

Most people recognize this psalm because Jesus quotes it from the cross. What sometimes gets overlooked is that David wrote it first, and it is one of the rawest cries of abandonment in all of scripture. David is not calmly explaining suffering here. He is not offering theology from a safe emotional distance. He is crying out into what feels like silence and being honest enough to admit that God feels absent.

Ellie never prays. The Last of Us isn’t really interested in religious language. But emotionally, the shape of her grief looks remarkably similar to what David describes in those opening verses. She is alive in a world that no longer makes sense to her. The people around her keep dying while she keeps surviving, and there is no explanation that makes the weight of that survivable.

She didn’t ask to be immune. She didn’t earn it. It simply happened to her, and then it started costing her everyone she loved.

By the end of the game, Ellie needs her survival to mean something. That’s why she was so willing to go to the Fireflies to be studied. Sure, she didn’t know they were going to have to kill her to do that. She didn’t want death, but with all the time we spent with the character, we can assume that she would’ve agreed to it. Because dying for a reason would’ve felt easier than living without one.

And Psalm 22 does something important here: it refuses to offer a clean explanation for suffering. David never gets a direct answer to his “why.” Instead, he keeps talking. He keeps bringing the pain to God instead of sealing himself off from Him entirely. Gradually, the psalm shifts; not because the circumstances suddenly improve, but because the act of crying out honestly becomes its own kind of faith.

“For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.”

That’s the turn in the psalm. It’s not an explanation. It’s just the assurance that the suffering was seen. That the cry mattered. That someone was listening even when it felt like there wasn’t.

Ellie never gets that assurance. Instead, Joel gives her something else entirely: a lie, and the truth hidden underneath it: that someone loved her enough to mow down a hospital full of people to keep her alive.

That isn’t redemption, but it isn’t nothing either.

What makes Ellie’s survivor’s guilt so devastating is that it’s woven into the basic fact of her existence. She survived the thing that is supposed to kill you. There’s no framework for that. No support group. No shared understanding. David at least belonged to a tradition of people who believed God heard them when they cried out.

Ellie has Riley’s memory, a guitar she barely knows how to play, and Joel.

Psalm 22 ends with praise. Not because the pain disappeared, but because David trusted the story was not over yet. That’s a difficult thing to hold onto when you are fourteen years old, emotionally exhausted, and surrounded by death.

But it may be the only honest hope the psalm offers.

The Last of Us doesn’t end with praise. It ends with “okay.”

And maybe, in this world, from this girl, that’s the closest thing to praise anyone could reasonably expect.

See you next Sunday with one more look at The Last of Us before moving on to a different game.

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