It’s taken months, but this is the third and final Sunday Sermon on Red Dead Redemption 2, and it’s the one that requires you to already know how it ends.
Not how RDR2 ends. How Red Dead Redemption ends. The original game. The one that came out in 2010 where John Marston is gunned down in the yard of the ranch he spent everything building, cut down by the government agents who were never going to honor their promise no matter how many of his old gang members he brought in. If you played the first one before the second one, then the epilogue of the second game is almost unbearable. You know where John is going. You’re watching him build the house.
The Red Dead Redemption 2 epilogue gets a bad reputation among some players who wanted the game to end with Arthur and feel cheated by the hours they spend following John around doing ranch chores and hammering nails and herding cattle. I am not one of those people. I think the epilogue is one of the most quietly profound things Rockstar has ever made. And I think it works precisely because it’s uncomfortable in exactly the way it’s supposed to be.
John Marston in the RDR2 epilogue is a man trying to become something he has never been. He can’t read. He doesn’t know how to farm. He has no practical skills that apply to civilian life because he has spent his entire adult existence as an outlaw. He takes out a loan he can barely justify to buy a piece of derelict land in the middle of nowhere, and then he and Uncle and Charles spend hours (days, in game time) building a house from the ground up with their own hands. He writes a letter to Abigail asking her to come see what he built. He milks cows and feeds chickens and does chores so mundane they become their own kind of meditation.
And you do all of it knowing he’s going to die in that yard in 1911. Three years after he built it.
Matthew 25. The parable of the talents.
A master goes on a journey and leaves different amounts of money (talents) with three servants. Two of them invest what they were given and double it. One buries his in the ground, afraid to lose it. When the master returns, he rewards the two who multiplied what they received and condemns the one who buried his out of fear. The parable is about stewardship. About what you do with what you’ve been given in the time you have to work with it.
John Marston was given a second chance he absolutely didn’t deserve. Arthur spent his last remaining strength and the last stretch of his dying life getting John out of Beaver Hollow, onto a train, and into a future that Arthur himself was never going to see. That is what John is carrying into the epilogue. Not just the guilt of survival, which we talked about in the Last of Us sermons, but the specific weight of knowing exactly who paid for the time he has.
He could bury it. He could ride off somewhere and spend what’s left of his freedom as an outlaw, which is the only life he actually knows how to live. He does the harder thing instead. He takes out the loan. He gets on the horse. He drives the nails. He builds the house. He brings his family home to a ranch that didn’t exist before he decided it should, on land that was derelict and worthless before he chose to make it into something.
The parable of the talents ends with one of the most-quoted lines in Matthew: “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Two servants hear it. One doesn’t. The difference between them isn’t talent or intelligence or even virtue exactly. It’s what they did with what they were given when the master wasn’t watching.
Arthur isn’t watching anymore. But John works like he is.
That’s the thing about the epilogue that makes it so emotionally effective if you let it be. John isn’t building Beecher’s Hope for himself. He’s not going to get to enjoy it for long, and some part of him probably knows that even before the Bureau shows up. He’s building it for Abigail and Jack. He’s taking the gift Arthur gave him and multiplying it into something his family can live in, something that will outlast the gunfight in the yard, something Jack will carry with him even after everything else is gone.
The master in the parable comes back eventually. The accounting happens. John’s accounting happens in 1911 in that yard, sooner than it should have, at the hands of people who were never going to leave him alone. But the ranch is built. The house is standing. Abigail is home. Jack is there. Whatever comes next, the servant did the work.
“Well done, good and faithful servant.”
It’s not how I’d choose to end John Marston’s story if I had the choice. But Rockstar didn’t give me the choice. They gave me a man with a hammer and a borrowed piece of land and three years of someone else’s sacrifice to justify, and they made me feel every nail.
Drop your thoughts in the comments. For me, the Red Dead Redemption 2 epilogue is one of the best things Rockstar has ever made.
When we next do this, which may or may not be next Sunday, we’ll be moving on to a new game, and I won’t try to make a trilogy of it again anytime soon.
