The end of the Good Place was the saddest ending to a TV show I have ever experienced. But not for the reasons you might think.

NBC recently concluded The Good Place, a witty, thoughtful, and heartfelt comedy about demons, angels, philosophy, and the afterlife. I thoroughly enjoyed this show, it had all the devastatingly funny smarts of 30 Rock with the warmth of The Office or Parks and Rec. The degree of difficulty of making jokes out of Kant is not to be underestimated. But even more, I found myself watching the show as a sort of a cultural commentary. What does a post-truth culture have so say about heaven and eternal life?^[1]At this point I want to offer a huge caveat. I am not critiquing the show itself. I loved the show, I thought the characters were brilliantly conceived—especially Sean, the head demon, who in the … Continue reading

Turns out, not much. I don’t say this critically or dismissively. But the show ends as each of the four main characters reaches a state of contentment in their eternal state and essentially euthanize their soul in a way suggestive of Buddhism, emptying one’s self of desire to the point where there’s nothing else to live for. The conclusion had all the tear-filled warmth of the endings of the best stories, minus the “happily ever after.”

In the penultimate episode of the show, we arrive at an eternal cocktail party where the residents of the Good Place are slowly evaporating into mindless pleasure zombies. They have lived in such lavish luxury with no conflict, sickness, or pain that all of the meaning has been ever so slowly emptied out of existence. This malaise is embodied by the Neoplatonist Hypatia of Alexandria, who studied philosophy and astronomy in the 3rd-4th centuries—Chidi even drops an amazing “I love her in a Neo-Platonic” way that though, it kills, is not enough to break the hypnosis of this aimless ‘Good Place.” The show’s solution to this problem: there has to be an end. It’s death, the writers conclude, that gives life meaning. So, in the trajectory of the show, even eternal life has to have an end.

In the last episode we see each of the main characters pray the prayer of annihilation, welcoming their own personal relationship with Nirvana, where they have done all there is to do, eaten all that there is to eat, seen everywhere there is to see. They reach this “inner peace” that clues them into the call to walk across the threshold of existence to non-being. We are supposed to see the nobility and peace of their contentment but watching each character reach this climactic moment to end all moments, I found myself not deeply moved at their nobility of spirit or rejoicing with them as they reached contentment but indignant at the smallness of the story.

The Good Place has no room for eternity, no room for individualism (a profound irony in a Western story about heaven), and ultimately, no room for love. The show is content to let philosophy and ethics be a guide for mapping the good life rather than love. Philosophy has historically questioned what is a good life and preparation, as Cicero says, for “learning how to die.”

But love, love teaches us how to live. Love makes us fully our authentic selves. The Bible bears witness to not just an everlasting God, an eternal being who not only exists without beginning or end but whose disposition towards the world at large and individuals made in his image is unfailing love (Jer. 31v3). Jesus came to earth to remove the sickness of sin from our hearts which like a wasting disease slowly eroded our bodies and souls. His death on the cross and resurrection to his reign unending declare to one and all that though it seems that entropy and ending are the ways of the universe, there is a grace that is stronger than the grave.


The Good places essentially portrays the main characters consuming life. Over the eons of multidimensional time, or as the Good Place hilariously labels them, Jeremy Bearimy’s, the characters visit every magnificent city, every time period, eat at every great restaurant, and even play the perfect game of Madden (BORTTLLLES!). At the end, there is nothing left to do but to surrender one’s soul to the ether. Life has been consumed. But the Bible tells a different story, of a love that never fails, a love that can never be consumed (Romans 8). But even more, that this love is so magnificent that it will always evoke our desire, always divulge deeper depths, always make us more creative, more exploratory, more loving, more ourselves.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 declares that God has placed eternity in the human heart. The great philosopher Augustine (to my recollection completely ignored by The Good Place) says of our longings even in heaven that we “will be insatiably satisfied, without growing weary. We will always be hungering, and always being filled.” ^[2]Augustine, Sermon

The impulse to say that it’s arrogant that we should think that we as individuals should live forever may sound noble in its humility, but its the humility born of, to channel Lewis, thinking less of ourselves, rather than thinking of ourselves less. Greg Boyle, the Jesuit priest who works with at-risk and gang-affiliated young people in in Los Angeles reminds us, “Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is our human occupational hazard to settle for little.” The Good Place is a settlement built upon a small story. But we were created for more.

This world with all of its pain, all of its suffering, all of its beauty aches for more. We long for justice, love, peace, community, to be fully known, and ultimately, we long for love. Perhaps we need an eternity that cannot exhaust our longings but an eternity that forever, in the paradoxical way that all the best things work, both fills our deepest longings and creates them. The love of God never fails, through life, death, and every Jeremy Bearimy, we shall never cease to hang on every word that comes from the mouth of God.^[3]Hans urs Von Balthasar

Some men are less than their works, some are more. To have known the man would have been enough; to know his books is enough. [He was] the same man in his life and in his writings.^[1]T. S. Eliot on Charles Williams. Feels appropriate for Eugene as well.

I suspect my story is not unusual. I was languishing in self-doubt, self-loathing, and self-absorption. I was a pastor, in title, not in practice. I was given a title and a job description but not a vision for doing God’s work that actually cultivated an awareness of God’s presence. Church work seemed like the least Christian work I could imagine. Five years into pastoring, I had made up my mind that I wanted to be more where the action was, where the power of the Gospel was manifested in ways I could touch, and where I frankly felt a little more useful. I was going to study law.

And then I met Eugene Peterson.

Up until that point, I was aware of Eugene Peterson but wrote him off as the author of a “popular” Bible translation—my two semesters of Greek encouraged me to use this word, “popular,” pejoratively…little did I know at that point that Peterson was a Semitic languages scholar whose translation, The Message, was a pastoral attempt to help his congregants better hear and read Scripture, it was not the first or the last time Eugene taught me a lesson in humility and listening. I picked up the book “Working The Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity.” This was my second conversion.

For the first time, a light was beginning to shine on what it meant to pastor not simply as a job but as a vocation. It would not be long before I had read every book I could find by Peterson. Eugene was drawing me into a deep life of doing for God that flowed from a being with God, a way of “saving souls” while finding my own. Eugene wrote as an artisan, a tradesman who crafted pictures out of words. Eugene was a storyteller in the heritage of Jesus himself, drawing people into the expansive world of Scripture and making its world seem not so distant from our own.

Before I met Eugene, people would ask me what I did for a living in different social situations and I would always respond “teacher.” I told myself that I did not want to push people away who might have reservations about the idea of talking to a pastor but really I am just not sure I believed in what I did—really, I am not sure I knew what it meant to be a pastor.  Eugene’s wise words and contemplative faith saved my own faith. Not my faith in Jesus, or in the power of the gospel, but my faith in pastoring— in doing thousands of seemingly irrelevant tasks faithfully, of committing to Scripture and prayer above all else, of discerning a vocation of deep spirituality in the midst of a demanding job description. Eugene Peterson awakened me to the reality that it is a profound and fearful thing to call one’s self a pastor. It is now a title I wear with great pride and even greater humility.

In an interview recently, Eugene said his hope for life’s work was simple, “I hope I can be part of changing the pastoral imagination of pastors in America.” To that prayer, I know the Lord has answered “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Eugene was my pastor. And by judging from my own experiences with my colleagues, Eugene was a pastor to thousands of other pastors and thus his congregation is in the millions. Though I never met Eugene, I apprenticed myself to him, acquainting myself with his generous mastery.He gave me a trade, he passed down tools of Word, gospel, prayer, and poetry, he invited me into the kind of work that dignifies a man, that makes him grateful for a hard day’s labor. He made me want to be a better pastor and a better man. He writes, “A life of congruence. It is the best word I can come up with to designate what I am after…”^[2]From Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places

I am not only grateful for Eugene’s life but forever shaped by it. I have great joy in the thought that at this very moment, Eugene is beholding and smiling at the face of the Savior he loved so dearly—I hope that Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Karl Barth, and John of Patmos are there for the first brunch by the lake as well.

Thank you, Eugene. You have been my companion in finding my way as a pastor, it is lonely work, and I needed you. ^[3]From Eugene Peterson’s The Pastor. The afterword is a “Letter to a Young Pastor”