Welcome back to The Sunday Sermon, where we are hopefully getting back on a consistent track with these (and some of the other series on the site). This week, we’re turning our attention away from Red Dead Redemption 2 and towards the 2018 reboot of God of War. I like the gameplay of the original God of War games much more so than the reboot, but it was still a great game and had a fun story that we’ll examine part of in this column.
There’s a line early in God of War that Kratos says to Atreus after the boy loses his temper.
“Do not be sorry. Be better.”
Four words. No lecture. No softness. Just the expectation, stated plainly, that whatever just happened is not an excuse and not a destination. You identify it, you learn from it, and you do better next time. It is the most compressed piece of parenting philosophy I have encountered in a video game, and it comes from a man who has spent the better part of four or six games being the living embodiment of what happens when rage goes completely unchecked.
That’s the tension God of War 2018 is built on. Kratos is trying to raise a son well. Kratos is also a man who killed his first wife and child in a blind fury, murdered most of the Greek pantheon, and spent decades being controlled by rage he could not manage. The tools he has for fatherhood are the tools of a warrior. The instinct he has to suppress in himself is the exact instinct he’s trying to keep from taking root in Atreus. And the game is honest enough to show you how badly equipped he is for the task and how hard he’s trying anyway.
The setup is this: Kratos and Atreus are scattering the ashes of Faye, Atreus’s mother and Kratos’s wife, at the highest peak in all the Nine Realms. She was the one who held the family together, who kept Atreus safe, who apparently knew a great deal more about what her son was and what he was heading toward than she ever told either of them. Her death is what puts the two of them alone together for the first time, really alone, with nothing between them except the road and the weight of what Kratos has never told his son about who they are.
Kratos has kept secrets. The biggest one is what he is. Atreus doesn’t know his father is a god. Doesn’t know about the Greek pantheon. Doesn’t know what his father did, who he killed, what he became before he came to Midgard and tried to become something else. Kratos has buried all of it under silence and controlled distance, which is the only way he knows to manage it, and the result is a son who can feel the walls without being able to see them.
That sent me to Ezekiel 18:20.
“The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, and the parent will not share the guilt of the child.”
Ezekiel is making a point against a specific kind of fatalism that was common in his day, and that is the idea that the sins of the fathers were automatically visited on the children, that you were born into a guilt you had no say in and couldn’t escape. The verse is a declaration of individual accountability. You are responsible for what you do. Not for what your father did.
Kratos knows this. He knows it in the way a man knows something he is terrified is not actually true. Because the evidence of his own life suggests the opposite. His father was Zeus, who was cruel and controlling and who used his children as instruments of his own power. Kratos became a man who was cruel and destructive and who treated the people around him as instruments of his rage. The pattern repeated. He became the thing that made him. And now he is standing in the snow of Midgard trying to raise a son and desperately, quietly, without the vocabulary to say it out loud, trying to break the chain.
The whole game is Kratos trying to be what Ezekiel promises is possible. Trying to make himself into a counterexample to his own history. And he does it in the only way he knows how: through discipline, through the control of his own emotions in front of his son, through the suppression of the rage that has defined him, and through those four words when Atreus slips. Do not be sorry. Be better.
He isn’t a perfect father. The game doesn’t let him be. There are moments where the distance costs Atreus something real, where the walls Kratos built to keep himself contained also keep his son out. The secrets he kept to protect Atreus end up complicating things in ways that a little honesty earlier might have prevented. And when Atreus learns the truth about what they are, about what Kratos has done, the weight of it lands on a kid who wasn’t prepared for it because his father didn’t know how to prepare him.
But Kratos is trying. With everything he has, with tools that were built for a completely different purpose, in a language that doesn’t come naturally to him, he is trying to be better than what made him.
Ezekiel’s declaration that the child will not bear the parent’s guilt is a promise of grace, breaking the legalistic fatalism of the ancient world. But God of War shows us what that promise demands in practice. Grace opens the door to a clean slate, but intentional effort is what keeps you from walking right back into the old habits.
Kratos cannot undo the destruction of Greece or the blood on his hands, but he can choose not to pass the sword to his son. His redemption isn’t found in a quiet sentiment or passive regret; it is forged through the painful work of daily, active repentance, swallowing his pride, holding back his rage, and choosing patience over wrath.
Do not be sorry. Be better.
It turns out four words can carry the full weight of practical sanctification. Kratos spent centuries as a mythic cautionary tale, but in Midgard, he finally learns how to become a father.
See you next Sunday.
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