We’ve spent the past couple of weeks on The Sunday Sermon exploring some pretty dark places. First we went to Yharnam in Bloodborne to talk about the dangers of pursuing knowledge without recognizing our own limitations, and then we visited Silent Hill to examine guilt, forgiveness and the terrible things people sometimes do to punish themselves for mistakes they cannot undo. This week, we’re continuing our October tour of horror games with something a little more action-packed, because I think we’ve earned a break from all the psychological torment. So grab your favorite handgun, make sure you’ve got a green herb handy, and let’s head to rural Spain for Resident Evil 4.
Released in 2005 and remade in 2023, Resident Evil 4 is one of the most influential games ever made, and it’s also one of my old favorites (the original version). The premise is simple enough. Leon S. Kennedy, the rookie police officer who survived the destruction of Raccoon City in Resident Evil 2, is now a government agent sent to rescue Ashley Graham, the kidnapped daughter of the President of the United States. His investigation leads him to a remote Spanish village, where the locals are considerably less welcoming than the average tourist might hope. Leon barely makes it through his first encounter with a villager before finding himself surrounded by an entire village of people determined to kill him, including a particularly enthusiastic gentleman carrying a chainsaw.
But these aren’t ordinary villagers, and they aren’t zombies either. They’re called Ganados, and they’ve been infected with a parasite known as Las Plagas. The parasite allows them to be controlled by the Los Iluminados cult, whose leader, Osmund Saddler, intends to use it to extend his influence far beyond the village. The Ganados can still speak, use weapons, work together, and carry out complicated tasks, but their behavior is being directed by something that has taken control of them from the inside. Saddler doesn’t simply want an army of monsters. He wants obedient followers, people who will carry out his commands without questioning them.
And that’s what makes Las Plagas such a disturbing idea. It’s one thing to fight a monster that’s trying to kill you. It’s something else entirely to discover that a person can still be walking around, talking, and going about their daily activities while something inside them has taken away their freedom. The villagers weren’t born as mindless servants of Saddler. They had lives before Los Iluminados came along, and now they’re being used to serve someone else’s ambitions.
Which brings me to Romans 6:16.
“Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness?”
Paul is talking about something that doesn’t require a parasite or a remote Spanish village to understand. He’s talking about what happens when we allow something to gain control over our lives, particularly when that something is sin. We tend to think of freedom as being able to do whatever we want, whenever we want, without anybody telling us otherwise. But Paul makes an uncomfortable point here. Just because you’re doing what you want doesn’t necessarily mean you’re free. Sometimes the things we keep choosing eventually become the things we have trouble saying no to.
Now, there’s an important difference between what Paul is describing and what happens in Resident Evil 4. The villagers and Ashley are victims of a parasite that has been forced upon them, while Paul is discussing the choices people make and the things they willingly give themselves over to. I’m not suggesting that somebody infected with Las Plagas is the equivalent of a sinner who needs to repent. What interests me is the picture the game gives us of what it looks like when something that doesn’t belong in a person’s life takes control of it.
And the really frightening part of Resident Evil 4 is that Leon doesn’t get to stand on the outside of that problem for very long.
Early in the game, Leon is captured by the village chief, Bitores Méndez, and infected with Las Plagas himself. He doesn’t immediately understand what’s been done to him, but as the story progresses, he begins experiencing symptoms of the parasite growing inside his body. Ashley has also been infected, and Saddler’s plan is to use her to spread his influence into the United States after she’s returned home. Leon came to Spain to rescue somebody from a cult, only to discover that the cult has already planted something inside him that could eventually turn him into one of its servants.
Think about that for a moment. Leon is still Leon. He’s still fighting, still making jokes, still buying increasingly ridiculous amounts of weaponry from a mysterious merchant who apparently has no concerns whatsoever about setting up shop in the middle of a parasite-infested nightmare. But there’s something inside him working against him, and the longer it remains there, the greater the danger that he’ll lose control of himself.
That’s where I think the comparison to Romans becomes interesting, because most of us don’t wake up one morning and decide we’re going to let something destructive take over our lives. It usually happens a little at a time. We develop habits, make excuses, tell ourselves we can stop whenever we want, and eventually discover that the thing we thought we were controlling has started controlling us. That can happen with anger, pride, greed, lust, resentment, or any number of things that might seem manageable when they first enter our lives.
And sometimes we don’t even recognize how much control we’ve surrendered until we try to take it back.
Paul continues the thought in Romans 6:17–18 by thanking God that those who had once been slaves to sin had become obedient from the heart to the teaching they received, and that they had been set free from sin to become servants of righteousness. That’s an important part of the passage, because Paul isn’t simply warning people that sin can enslave them. He’s reminding Christians that they don’t have to remain enslaved to it. Through Christ, a different way of living is possible.
Back in Resident Evil 4, Leon and Ashley eventually discover that there’s a way to remove the parasites before they mature beyond the point where removal can save them. Luis Sera, a former researcher connected to Los Iluminados, helps them along the way, and his research provides the means to destroy the parasites inside their bodies. Luis is an interesting character in his own right, because he’s a man trying to make up for his involvement in something terrible. In both versions of the game, his assistance proves essential, even though he doesn’t survive to see Leon and Ashley escape.
By the time Leon and Ashley reach the island laboratory where the parasites can be removed, they’ve both endured more than enough to make most people reconsider their vacation plans. They’ve been captured, separated, attacked by monsters and repeatedly threatened by Saddler, who can use their infections against them. The removal procedure isn’t pleasant, either. It uses specialized radiation equipment to destroy the parasites, and the process is painful and dangerous. But the alternative is allowing those things to keep growing until Leon and Ashley are no longer in control of their own bodies.
In the original game, Leon undergoes the procedure first, with Ashley operating the equipment, and then helps remove her parasite. The remake changes the sequence, with Leon treating Ashley before she later saves him by performing the procedure while he’s unconscious. Either way, the important thing is that both of them are finally free of Saddler’s control. They still have to escape the island, and Leon still has a rather unpleasant final encounter with Saddler ahead of him, but the thing that threatened to turn them into unwilling servants has been removed.
And I think that’s worth considering alongside what Paul is telling us in Romans 6. The point of Christianity isn’t that we become perfect people who never struggle with temptation again. Christians still make mistakes, still develop bad habits, and still find themselves wrestling with things they know they shouldn’t be doing. Paul understood that struggle well enough to write about it extensively. But there’s a difference between struggling against sin and simply accepting that sin is going to be your master.
One of the things I appreciate about Resident Evil 4 is that Leon never treats his infection as something he should simply learn to live with. He doesn’t decide that because Saddler has already gotten a parasite inside him, he might as well give up and become another Ganado. He keeps fighting, keeps looking for a way to remove it, and keeps helping Ashley do the same. Even when the parasite begins interfering with his ability to control his own body, he refuses to willingly surrender to Saddler.
Obviously, we aren’t going to find a machine that can remove pride or greed or anger with a few carefully aimed beams of radiation. It would certainly make things easier if we could, although knowing the Resident Evil universe, the machine would probably malfunction and turn us into something with six arms and a giant eyeball. But the spiritual answer Paul gives us isn’t some complicated procedure or secret knowledge hidden away in a laboratory. It’s a changed relationship with sin through Jesus Christ, one in which we’re no longer required to live as though the things that once controlled us have the final say over who we are.
And I think that last part matters more than we sometimes realize. We have a habit of defining ourselves by the things we’ve struggled with, particularly when those struggles have gone on for years. We start believing that we’re simply angry people, selfish people, people who will always fall into the same bad habits because that’s just who we’ve become. But Romans 6 doesn’t describe sin as something Christians are supposed to accept as their permanent master. Paul tells us that we’ve been set free from its dominion, and that freedom comes with a responsibility to live differently.
That doesn’t mean change is always easy or that every struggle disappears the moment somebody becomes a Christian. Some habits take a long time to break, and sometimes we need help from other people along the way. But we shouldn’t confuse the difficulty of changing with the impossibility of changing. The fact that something has controlled part of your life for years doesn’t mean it has to control the rest of it.
Resident Evil 4 begins with Leon walking into a village full of people who have lost control of themselves, and it ends with him and Ashley escaping after removing the very thing that threatened to do the same to them. Along the way, there’s enough gunfire, explosions, chainsaws and wonderfully ridiculous one-liners to remind you that you’re still playing one of the greatest action horror games ever made. But underneath all that spectacle is a simple idea that fits rather well with what Paul was teaching the Romans nearly two thousand years ago.
Just because something has gotten hold of you doesn’t mean you have to spend the rest of your life letting it control you.
And through Christ, the things that once mastered you don’t have to be your master anymore.
See you next Sunday.
