Father Barron points out the religious significance of the Coen's production of "True Grit":
Finally, Mattie frees herself and shoots to death her father’s murderer, but the recoil on the gun is so strong that she is pushed into a snake pit, where she receives a bite on the hand. I’ll get back to the snake pit in a moment, but notice first what this canny fourteen year old girl’s lust for vengeance has wrought: eight dead men. She wanted only to bring her father’s killer to justice, but the single-mindedness of her pursuit conduced toward a disproportionate, even barbaric, result, something far beyond the requirements of justice. Her excessive and one-sided passion for righteousness kicked her into a den of snakes, and no one with a Biblical sensibility could miss the symbolic overtone of this kind of fall.
As she lies helpless and desperately injured, Mattie looks up and sees Rooster Cogburn lowering himself by rope to the bottom of the pit. He cuts into her wound and sucks out as much of the poison as he can and then he brings her back up, places her on a horse and commences a furious ride to the nearest doctor who is many miles away. When the horse gives way from sheer exhaustion beneath him, Rooster picks up Mattie in his arms and carries her through the night to the doctor’s home. Now Cogburn is a man of the law, and like Mattie, he was aiming to bring a killer to justice, but what these heroic actions on behalf of the girl reveal is that he more than that. His passion for justice is accompanied by, even surpassed, by his mercy, his graciousness, his willingness to give even when that giving was not, strictly speaking, owed.
As the film comes to a close, we have fast-forwarded many years into the future, and a still prim, unmarried, and somewhat cold Mattie has just learned of the death of Rooster Cogburn. We then see that she has but one arm. Though Rooster’s graciousness saved Mattie’s life, the doctor, evidently, was not able to save her limb. And as the final credits roll, we hear the beautiful old spiritual “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” which speaks of the “fellowship and joy divine” which comes from “leaning on the everlasting arms” of God. Rooster had carried Mattie in his two arms, evocative of both justice and mercy, attributes that come together supremely in God. Mattie’s tragedy is that she had only justice, only one arm. The same Coen brothers who gave us a powerful image of God in the tornado at the conclusion of “A Serious Man” and in the pregnant police officer in “Fargo” have given us still another in the strong arms of Rooster Cogburn.
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