This is the third, and final, Sunday Sermon on The Last of Us, and I want to start somewhere specific.

There is a moment about two-thirds of the way through the game, right after you emerge from a building in Salt Lake City, where the world just stops. You and Ellie come out into an open area, and there are giraffes. Just giraffes, walking peacefully through the ruins of a city that nature has been slowly reclaiming for twenty years. Overgrown buildings in the background. Mountains in the distance. The sky doing something beautiful. And two people who have been through fifteen hours (for us, longer for them, of course) of the worst that humanity has to offer just standing there watching animals that have no idea the world ended.

I wrote about that moment in my original 2013 review. I said I had to put the controller down. That’s still true. I have beaten The Last of Us more times than I can count; seven or eight times on PS3 alone before the Remastered version came out on PS4, and several more after that, and that moment has never once stopped working on me. Every single time, without fail, something in my chest does something it doesn’t do anywhere else in any game I have ever played.

The first two sermons in this series went to some heavy places. Week one was about Joel and the hospital ending, and what Romans 5 says about a love that acts before the person deserves it. Week two was about Ellie and survivor’s guilt and what Psalm 22 sounds like when it comes from a fourteen-year-old girl who can’t stop asking why she gets to keep walking when everyone around her doesn’t. Both of those columns were about the weight the game puts on you. This one is about the moment it sets that weight down for just a little while. And I think that moment might be the most theologically honest thing in the entire game.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 says: “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

There are two distinct claims in that verse, and I want to sit with both of them, because the giraffe scene illustrates each one in a different way.

The first claim is that beauty is not random. It’s not accidental, or a byproduct of evolution or chemistry, or the brain doing something interesting when it encounters certain combinations of light and color and scale. The claim is that God made things beautiful deliberately and that He placed them in time with intention. Beautiful in its time is doing a lot of work in that verse. It isn’t just saying that beautiful things exist. It’s saying that the timing of beauty matters. That the right beautiful thing arriving at the right moment is itself a kind of gift, a kind of communication.

By the time you reach Salt Lake City in The Last of Us, the game has taken almost everything from you emotionally. You have watched Tess die. You have watched Sam turn, and Henry put him down, and then put himself down thirty seconds later in the same room. You have survived David, which is one of the most harrowing sequences in gaming history. You have crossed a broken country with a girl who has been carrying a weight nobody her age should have to carry, and you have felt that weight in your hands through the controller the entire time. The world of The Last of Us is relentless in a way that feels honest rather than manipulative because it earns every dark moment. It never lets the darkness feel cheap.

And then it gives you giraffes.

That’s the beautiful in its time part. Not beautiful in spite of the devastation, but because of where it’s placed in the sequence of everything that came before it. If you dropped that same giraffe scene into a lighthearted adventure game it would be a nice moment and nothing more. In The Last of Us, coming when it comes, after everything that preceded it, it is something else entirely. It is grace. Unearned, unexpected, quietly overwhelming grace arriving in the middle of a world that has given you very little reason to expect it. The contrast is the point. The darkness of everything before it is what makes the light of that moment feel like it costs something to give.

That’s not an accident of game design. That’s Ecclesiastes in action, even though Naughty Dog didn’t intend it that way.

The second claim in that verse is the harder one, and I think it’s the one that explains why the moment hits people the way it does, even on repeat playthroughs. “He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” There is something in us, the verse says, that was built for a bigger story than the one we’re currently living inside. We are wired for eternity in a way we can feel but can’t fully articulate. We reach for it. We recognize it when something brushes up against it, even when we can’t explain what just happened or why our eyes went wet over something we’ve seen a dozen times before.

That restlessness, that sense of something larger than what we can see from where we’re standing, is exactly what the giraffe scene creates. You are in the ruins of civilization, looking at something that seems ancient and unhurried and completely indifferent to the collapse around it. The giraffes don’t know the world ended. They don’t know about the cordyceps or the Fireflies or the lie Joel is going to tell in about an hour. They are just there, enormous and peaceful, doing what they have always done. And for just a moment standing next to them, you feel the weight of eternity pressing in from outside the edges of the frame. You feel, without being able to name it, that this broken world is not the whole story.

Joel feels it too. That’s the other thing about this scene that I can’t stop thinking about. You have watched Joel shut down every emotional response to beauty or softness for the entire game. He is a man who survived twenty years of the apocalypse by turning the part of himself that could be hurt by beautiful things all the way down. He doesn’t allow himself things like this. And he stands there next to Ellie and looks at those giraffes, and you can see something in him that the infected and the hunters and two decades of grief couldn’t completely kill. Something that the love he’s rebuilt for this girl has slowly been coaxing back to the surface all game. Something that is still capable of being stopped in its tracks by a giraffe in a ruined city.

That’s the thread that ties all three of these sermons together, now that I think about it. Week one was about a man whose love drove him to do something terrible and whose heart was broken open again by a fourteen-year-old girl after twenty years of keeping it shut due to the murder of his similarly aged daughter. Week two was about a girl carrying an impossible question that she couldn’t put down. This week is about the moment between those two people where the weight lifts, just briefly, just enough, and something beautiful walks through an overgrown city and reminds both of them that the world is not only the dark thing it has been showing them for fifteen hours.

Romans 5 tells us that love acts before it’s deserved. Psalm 22 told us that crying out into the silence matters even when you can’t hear an answer. Ecclesiastes 3:11 tells us that God has placed beauty in time with intention, and that He has placed in us the capacity to receive it even when we’re broken, even when we’re exhausted, even when we’ve been carrying things that people our age were never supposed to carry.

The best art touches that. The Last of Us touches it more than any game I know.

Three weeks. Best game I’ve ever played, as a single player game where I cared about the story. Still lessons to be learned from it.

Next week, we’re going somewhere completely different. See you Sunday.

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