The personal and specific element is crucial here, because the Christian tradition offers not one but many different explanations for how suffering fits into a providential plan. In some cases — the miser growing old alone, the dictator consumed by paranoia — the wicked may suffer as a kind of fitting, self-created punishment for their sins. But then in other cases suffering may be a gift to the righteous, given because their goodness means that they can bear more of its hard medicine, its refining fire. (There is a longstanding Christian tradition that finds it more theologically perplexing when good things happen to good people than when bad things do.)

Then in still other cases, suffering is bound to some purpose beyond the self. Before Jesus heals a blind man, the disciples wonder whose sin made him blind, and their master’s answer is stark: “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.” There is no retreat to mystery here; the man was born blind just so that the Messiah could heal him.