Why God? Why, God?
You may have noticed something a little unusual about the title of this morning’s sermon: “Why God? Why, God? – The Journey from Despair to Advent Joy.”
In several respects, the sermon itself feels a bit unusual to me as well.
First, this will be my final sermon as your Minister and Stated Supply here at Central Presbyterian Church. It has been a profound privilege to serve among you, and I depart with deep gratitude for the two years we have shared together.
Second, I have chosen a somewhat different path today. Rather than beginning with a biblical text and moving outward, I want to begin with a question, one that presses upon every human heart, and then listen carefully for what Scripture offers in reply.
The title “Why God? Why, God?” names two distinct cries that rise from the human soul.
“Why God?” is a question of purpose.
“Why God” at all? Why gather on Sunday mornings? Why sing, pray, and listen together? Why invest time and energy in Christian community? What makes any of this ultimately worthwhile? Why God?
“Why, God?” is a cry of pain.
Why, God, if you are all‑good, all‑powerful, and sovereign, does the world contain so much evil, suffering, and injustice? With Job we ask, “Why do the wicked prosper?” (Job 21). With the psalmist we confess, “I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked… pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence” (Psalm 73:3–6). As we were prophetically reminded us last Sunday, Shakespeare gave immortal voice to this same anguish in the opening line of Richard III: “Now is the winter of our discontent…”
Why, God?
This morning, I want to approach these twin questions in the language I know best: music, specifically, the music of Ludwig van Beethoven.
Last Wednesday, December 17th, marked the 225th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven. By the age of forty‑six, Beethoven was completely deaf, an unimaginable tragedy for a composer. Yet eight years later, at fifty‑four, he completed his Ninth Symphony and, during the final years of his life, three late piano sonatas of staggering depth. Among them is Sonata No. 31 in A‑flat major, Op. 110, written in total deafness, while he was gravely ill and convinced he was nearing death.
In its thirty minutes of music, I believe we hear a profound reflection of the human condition, and a startling word of hope.
Let us go back to where Scripture begins: Genesis 1, the goodness of creation.
In the beginning, God brought order out of chaos and declared all that he had made to be good. The crown of that creation was humanity itself, male and female, made in the image of God and pronounced very good. Whatever else the image of God may include, it surely encompasses equality, dignity, beauty, harmony, balance, and peace.
It is fascinating that the biological code of life, DNA, is built on just four molecules. In much the same way, the entire structure of Beethoven’s Opus 110 grows from one simple musical interval: the perfect fourth. From that single building block, Beethoven constructs music of breathtaking complexity and beauty.
In the opening movement we hear innocence, purity, and serene elegance, music that reminds me of creation’s original harmony, before it was damaged by human disobedience.
[Play on the piano the opening theme of the first movement]
Creation was good. But goodness did not endure.
Disobedience entered the story. With it came fracture and distortion. Pain, toil, and death became our common lot. Equality gave way to domination. Dignity to dehumanization. Beauty to exploitation. Harmony to war. Balance to division. Peace to brokenness.
Beethoven’s serene opening is not allowed to remain untouched. The very melody that once sounded so innocent turns dark, turbulent, anguished.
[Play on the piano the shift into the minor tonality with rumbling and turbulent left hand figure]
Ever since the fall, something deep within us has yearned to return to the goodness we have lost. We are, it seems, hard‑wired for transcendence, always reaching beyond ourselves for something higher, truer, more enduring. Philosophers across the centuries have named this longing in different ways, but at its heart lies the human search for meaning, significance, and tender reassurance of home.
I suggest that this restless longing is nothing less than the echo of Eden, the soul’s memory of having been made in the image of perfection, and its desire to be restored.
And here the gospel breaks in with astonishing news: God has provided the way back.
This way back is not a philosophy or a method. It is a person,Jesus Christ, God’s own Son. When every other remedy failed, God the Son, divinity and humanity in one person, entered our fractured story, lived the perfect life we could not live, died the death we deserved, and, most decisively, was raised bodily from the grave.
Beethoven brings Opus 110 toward its turning point with one of the most extraordinary passages he ever wrote, composed when he was gravely ill and convinced that death was near. In the final movement we hear despair itself: gasping, sobbing, and teetering on the edge of collapse. The music seems almost unable to continue, as though it were bearing the full weight of grief and exhaustion. It is a lament of paradoxical weakness, violent in its intensity yet fragile in its vulnerability, music that does not merely describe suffering but inhabits it, allowing anguish to speak in its own broken voice.
[Play on the piano the “lament” section of the sonata]
Then, suddenly, after the lament, come ten mysterious repeated chords, unexplained, almost otherworldly. From that moment, the music begins to rise. “Little by little, with renewed strength,” Beethoven instructs the performer. What follows is a fugue in the key of G major, a tonality long associated with warmth, joy, and friendship. Yet this joy is not simple or naïve. The music soon moves into the darker hues of G minor, a key that carries introspection and emotional depth. The scars do not vanish; they are remembered. And then, at last, the music turns again, returning to the home key of A‑flat major, the key in which the sonata began. Strength is restored, but it is a strength seasoned by suffering. Life returns. The theme that once wept now sings, not by forgetting sorrow, but by passing through it into radiant triumph.
[Play the finale from the repeated chords to the conclusion of the sonata]
In the radiant close of Opus 110, Beethoven does not merely resolve his sonata; he erupts into exultation. The same voice that sobbed in darkness now sings with uncontainable delight. What began in weakness rises in strength; what trembled in lament now stands in triumph. This is the music of resurrection, where suffering is not erased but transformed, where death is not denied but conquered. It is, in the fullest sense, Advent music: the sound of hope arriving after long waiting, of light breaking through the shadows, of life returning where all seemed lost.
Dear friends, the resurrection of Jesus is God’s definitive answer to both versions of our question.
To “Why God?” the resurrection gives this answer: Because in Christ, alignment with God’s original purpose is possible once again. Jesus himself declares, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). In him, the image of God, once fractured by sin, is perfectly restored, and all who follow him are being remade into that same image.
And to “Why, God?”, the anguished cry that rises from suffering, the resurrection speaks just as clearly: Evil and death do not have the last word. As Paul proclaims with defiant hope, “We will all be changed, in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye… the perishable will be clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality” (1 Corinthians 15:51–53). One day, every question born of pain will be silenced, not by explanation, but by presence, in the presence of the Answer himself, the Resurrection and the Life.
The angel’s word to the shepherds rings out anew: “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.” Why God? Because in the Child of Bethlehem, God has drawn near. Why, God? Because in the triumph of Easter morning, God has answered sorrow with boundless joy.
This is the hope that has sustained me in ministry, and it is the hope I leave with you today: that the God who raised Jesus from the dead is faithful; that every imperfection is temporary; and that in the end, the good, the beautiful, and the true will prevail.
May this joy, the joy of sins forgiven, of death defeated, of the image of God being restored in us, carry you through every “Why God?” and every “Why, God?” until the day we see him face to face.
Come, Lord Jesus.
Amen.