Modern society assumes suffering can be solved through policy, technology and progress. But this belief leaves us unprepared for the reality that tragedy is an enduring part of human life.

Rising petrol prices, geopolitical instability and the threat of wider conflict in the Middle East remind us how quickly things can unravel. These are not aberrations in an otherwise orderly world. They expose the fragility of the assumption that life is fundamentally ordered and that justice will prevail.

As Easter approaches, I am reminded that in the earliest Gospel of Mark the story ends in darkness and uncertainty. Jesus dies abandoned. The women who find the empty tomb flee in fear and say nothing to anyone. There is no resolution, there is no retribution. The Roman Empire and the religious leaders who condemned Jesus to death carry on with their lives. Justice is not served.

This is why I have always felt more connected to the ambivalence of Good Friday, than the certainty of Easter Sunday. It seems more in tune with the times that we live in. Life is difficult and obscure, marked by mystery and suffering. By contrast, Easter Sunday often seems strained, with an enforced sense of joy and conviviality that does not always feel true. It reflects a deeper belief that the world should ultimately make sense, that suffering will be resolved rather than endured.

In the 1960s, psychologist Melvin Lerner gave this belief a name: the “ just-world hypothesis.” Governments now promise outcomes that earlier generations would have assigned to fate or providence. We are told that perfect equity can be achieved, disease overcome, and that the climate can be stabilised through rational planning and technological progress. The language of Net Zero reflects this ambition.

The just-world belief is noticeable in contemporary geopolitical crises. As tensions escalate in the Middle East, attention turns to the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage through which a significant proportion of the world’s oil supply flows. The language used to describe the situation is strikingly technical: supply chains, disruptions, strategic responses and market corrections, reflecting an underlying belief that conflict and suffering can be managed through human ingenuity.

This same logic extends into our inner lives where mental health is increasingly framed through the medicalisation, self-help therapy and positive psychology. These rationalistic and symptom-based approaches to wellbeing are recognisable in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) that lists “prolonged grief disorder,” as a condition that interferes with normal functioning and may require clinical intervention.

When sorrow becomes a diagnosis and risk an error to be managed, tragedy itself begins to look like a malfunction. Human pain is no longer a mystery to endure but a technical fault to fix.

Yet this denial of tragedy leaves us spiritually malnourished. When suffering intrudes, we are left disoriented, blaming others, blaming ourselves, or retreating into data and diagnoses. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman observed that modernity treats death as a technical failure. When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after take-off in 1986, a NASA spokesperson announced, “Obviously a major malfunction.” All seven crew members had died. This phrase has become emblematic of our cultural response to death. Catastrophe is framed as an error in procedure or technology rather than a confrontation with human vulnerability. The same is now true of suffering itself. It is no longer a teacher or a test, but a problem of system design, something that can be corrected once the right measures are in place.

Earlier cultures understood something that the modern west has largely forgotten: suffering is not merely a problem to be solved, but an experience that can deepen human life. This older understanding occasionally breaks through our secular rationalistic culture. After losing two of his sons in quick succession, Australian musician Nick Cave wrote of grief as opening an “impossible realm” in which glimpses of something beyond an ordered and just-world become perceptible. He stressed that in severe grief and loss, the illusion of control dissolves and the individual is confronted with something undeniably larger than themselves.

This older wisdom stands in direct opposition to the just-world hypothesis and finds its most profound expression in the Book of Job. Composed around the sixth century BCE, it begins with Satan challenging God to a wager. Satan argues that Job is only faithful because he has been blessed with good fortune and that once this disappears, he will curse God and his creation. And so Job, who is blameless and upright, loses his wealth, his children and his health. His friends who witness his distress insist there must be a reason, that he has sinned and is being punished. The idea is meant to offer comfort by suggesting that suffering is deserved and that the world is predictable. Job refuses their consolations. He insists on his innocence and demands an answer.

When God speaks, he does not provide a rational justification but rather a confrontation with the vastness of existence: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? (Job 38:4)

The confrontation is not hubristic cruelty. It is a necessary shock: Job is shown that the universe is not rational, predictable and morally comprehensible. His pain is not evidence of guilt. His good fortune was not evidence of virtue. The world is a mystery far larger than any moral system that human beings try to impose upon it. Job’s suffering is neither explained nor undone, but transformed. The shift is not from ignorance to information but from grievance to awe, humility and wonder.

This is what makes Job so unsettling for the modern mind. We have built our civilisation on the belief that suffering can be prevented, that progress, science and policy will protect us from catastrophe. The just-world illusion has become the operating system of the modern West.

Yet suffering persists. Tragedy returns. Progress disappoints.

This is not an argument for resignation. The horrors of war, climate change, and the crisis of youth mental health demand moral courage, compassion and action. But action without a tragic understanding of life becomes driven more by fear than wisdom. The just-world belief offers comfort, but it leaves us unprepared for the experiences that define us. When we deny tragedy, we do not become more humane; we become more brittle, anxious and lost.

Like the Book of Job, Good Friday also offers no assurance that suffering will be explained or redeemed within the terms we expect. It reveals a world that cannot be manipulated or fully understood.

A more durable response to the just-world belief is to acknowledge that the tragic and uncontrollable nature of our existence is not an error in the system, but an enduring formative feature of human life.

This aligns with the fact that we do not live in the light of Easter Sunday. As St Paul wrote, we see through a glass, darkly. And it is Good Friday and the wisdom of Job, rather than Easter Sunday, that speaks most clearly to that condition. It invites us to act, not as engineers of a perfect world, but as human beings willing to face life in its full, mysterious depth. To be human is not to avoid suffering, but to be transformed by it.