The great American philosopher William James once said, "If we were to ask the question: 'What is human life's chief concern?' one of the answers we should receive would be: 'It is happiness'." But, if that is the point of it all, what can make human life happy?

The question sounds quite simple, and yet the answer is so elusive.

Popular wisdom would suggest that modern people living lives of relative prosperity in secure surroundings ought to be able to identify themselves as happy. And yet, this is plainly not the case.

In 2010, the ABC screened an intriguing programme called Making Australia Happy. The setting was "Australia's unhappiest suburb" - namely, Marrickville, in Sydney's inner west. A group of decidedly unhappy people were led through their paces by a group of "happiness psychologists" in an attempt to improve their happiness.

The approach of the show was, of course, putatively scientific. It involved blood tests, and sophisticated machines. We were told about the "science of happiness." What did the scientists advise? That contemplating our mortality, performing acts of altruistic service, finding ways to forgive those who have wronged us, meeting people and learning to give thanks for what we have are all essential to the genuinely and measurably more happy human life.

And now everyone wants school kids to be happy, too. A good friend who is a leading educator told me recently that the latest "thing" in educational philosophy is the idea that education should promote the wellbeing, happiness and resilience - these are the buzzwords - of young people.

It doesn't take much time on Google to discover school websites that advertise the priority of the happiness and wellbeing of their students.

Parents and schools alike, it would seem, are recognising that there is more to the education of young people than getting good enough results that you can earn a large amount of money. This hunch is confirmed by the statistics: it is becoming increasingly evident to researchers that increased wealth and consumerism are not delivering on their promise of a happier life. But more than that, we are also riding a wave of deep sadness that won't go away, because we are not preparing our children for the difficulties of life.

The "turn to happiness" in educational circles is founded on some serious research. "Resilience," "wellbeing" and "authentic happiness" are all terms associated with the Positive Psychology movement, which takes its lead from the seminal work of Martin Seligman, among others. Widely known for his books Authentic Happiness, Learned Optimism, The Optimistic Child and, most recently, Flourish, Seligman is more than a daytime chat-show shrink - he is, in fact, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Put briefly, Seligman's claim is that giving people (and especially children) good self-esteem just isn't sufficient. We are in the midst, he says, of an epidemic of childhood and adulthood depression. And those who avoid depression are those who develop a more optimistic outlook on life - those who are able to read negative events in their lives not as permanent and catastrophic, but as temporary and surmountable. Seligman writes:

"People want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play. We have the opportunity to create a science and a profession that not only heals psychological damage but also builds strengths to enable people to achieve the best things in life."

He is certainly optimistic about happiness, and it's a noble ambition. Christian theology would note that many of the observations found in Seligman's work are already the kinds of things that Christians do: giving thanks, making amends, attending to relationships over work, practicing generosity and so on.

The question remains, however: can one find happiness or wellbeing through a set of techniques or practices? Can one replicate the shape of happiness without really understanding its inner core? Can one really have a view of the world that is materialist, for example, and find the kind of happiness that Seligman speaks of?

The pursuit of happiness

A few years ago, I was fascinated to read David Malouf's essay The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World. Malouf is a novelist of the highest order who has written profoundly over many years about the human condition. In particular, he draws for inspiration on the Graeco-Roman world, and its ideals of friendship as a means for overcoming suffering.

In this delightful piece of writing, Malouf probes the notion of happiness and our modern conception of it. He reminds us that Thomas Jefferson, in framing the Declaration of Independence in 1776, added "the pursuit of Happiness" to "Life" and "Liberty" as one of the unalienable Rights that human beings received from their Creator.

Whether Jefferson intended it or not, this turned out to be a radical turn. "Happiness" might have been understood to mean something quite objective and material: the state of being happily favoured by your circumstances, in other words. But the word also came to mean the state of pleasure that we experience when things are going well for us. What the Declaration seems to offer- and has often been taken to offer in the political arrangement that it was to spawn - is "happiness" in the sense of "contentment, satisfaction, pleasure." In addition, the Declaration does not see happiness as something deferred to an afterlife. Human beings are entitled to expect this in the here and now.

What could deliver on this promise? That, you might say, has been the problem for politics in the Western world ever since. Happiness - by which we mean happiness as something I must feel - is to be expected to arise from the arrangement of society itself. It is a promise for today. If I am not happy, then who is to blame?

As Malouf sees it, it is likely that most people would say they have little about which to complain. We live the good life of which our grandparents and great-grandparents might only have dreamed. Our children generally do not die as babies. We are not vulnerable to the old epidemics. We are well-fed, educated and cared for into our dotage by a diligent state.

But why would so few people say they are actually happy? Despite all our gains, we still feel a sense of unease and insecurity. Malouf's diagnosis is that this is because in the "space age" the world has become vastly bigger than the world we can directly experience with our bodies. "What we inhabit now is the Planet," writes Malouf, and with it comes a sense of connection and responsibility that is overwhelming and exhausting. We now realise that we inhabit several overlapping complex systems ' the economy and the environment being just two of these. And the usual instruments of technical expertise do not yet seem to have gained us protection from the powerful waves that sweep over us. Thus he writes:

"What most alarms us in our contemporary world, what unsettles and scares us, is the extent to which the forces that shape our lives are no longer personal - they know nothing of us; and to the extent that we know nothing of them - cannot put a face to them, cannot find in them anything we recognise as human - we cannot deal with them. We feel like small, powerless creatures in the coils of an invisible monster, vast but insubstantial, that cannot be grasped or wrestled with."

As we become more and more aware of our physical smallness, Malouf notes, we have become more and more aware of our own bodies. We spend more time looking in the mirror than ever before in human history. Something has changed in our approach to the death of the body, too. The horror of death has now become, not the fear of non-being or the fear of judgement, but rather the fear that we will live beyond the functionality and pleasurableness of our own bodily life. It is nursing home that is the new hell for modern people.

So, how to be happy? Malouf's suspicion is that we need to be happy "within limits." Be happy now - for who knows what lies ahead? Rest and contentment may indeed prove out of our grasp. But we can find, or at least ought to seek, our happiness in what lies near us and around us. It is "a kind of happiness he can make do with from one day to the next."

Malouf sounds like the teacher from Ecclesiastes at this point. And his wisdom is, on one level, profound: recognition of our limits is key; a focus on ephemeral pleasurable sensations is making us sad; fear of what we cannot control is pointless, since we cannot control it. But it is a sadly disappointing vision of human life. I feel like asking Malouf, "Is that all?" Like Jefferson, Malouf tends to reject Christianity's view of happiness as being all about the afterlife - assuming that it is a notion which corrupts even the small pleasures we have in the present by telling us that they are at best distractions from the bliss of the final state and at worst downright evil.

Who are the happy?

At this point, we need to make reference to the full eschatological hope of Christianity. The gospel of the resurrected Christ tells us that the happinesses we may experience now are in fact the first tastes of what is to come in the new heaven and the new earth. The vast wheel of history is not turned by some blind impersonal combination of forces, but by the God of Jesus Christ. We can recognise our own limits, but in hope cast our cares on him. We can consider our own mortality in the light of the resurrection; give thanks to a God who is gracious, and not just to lady luck; seek to serve others following the example of Jesus Christ himself; and forgive one another our sins as we know we have been forgiven.

Let me illustrate this point by means of a biblical text that might seem somewhat surprising: the so-called Beatitudes of Matthew 5:1-12. Jesus's own happiness manifesto, if you will, is found in this passage, but it is quite a shock to read (the word usually translated "blessed," incidentally, in fact means "happy").

So who does Jesus think is actually happy in this life? It is quite a list. The poor in spirit, for example: those who suffer not from material poverty, but who have had a kind of inner crisis of the soul. Or those who mourn: those who have experienced grief and loss and all that accompanies it. Here the mourning of which Jesus speaks is not just grief at a death, but the sorrow of a person for their own sins before God. Or the meek: not the grandest or the proudest or the most boastful.

This is an unexpected reversal of those we would imagine as being happy; but there is more to come. There are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness: they know that something is wrong with the world, deeply wrong - that there is a lack of justice in it, and they yearn for the time when things will be put to rights. And there are the merciful, too; and the pure in heart; and the peacemakers: these are people who recognize how imperfect human affairs are and how our world is not characterized by mercy, or purity, or peace, but more often by severity, debauchery and violence.

It is a remarkable group, these happy people. They are powerless, unattractive, sad, lacking in confidence and self-esteem. What this group would seem to have in common is that they are evidently not happy: not happy with themselves and not happy with the way things are. But that isn't all: they are a group of people calling out to God for help. They are people who know that if anyone can right the wrongs - even the wrongs of which they themselves are guilty - it is only the God of heaven and earth.

But there is one more thing to add about the identity of this truly happy group. Jesus says, "Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me." It turns out these are not just any people, but people who identify as Jesus's disciples. Jesus is not just the deliverer of the message, in other words - he is part of the message he has come to deliver.

So why are they happy? Jesus himself provides the reasons: each time he nominates one of the conditions of true happiness he gives an explanation of why it is so. Here are some of the reasons that these people are happy: theirs is the kingdom of heaven (they gain citizenship in God's own country); they will be comforted (their tears will be wiped away); they will inherit the earth (the creation and everything in it will belong to them as it had belonged to the first man and woman); their hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled (because God will bring justice to the earth); they will be shown mercy (their sins will be forgiven and they will be able to live with God and his people); they will see God (they will not just hear of him, they will see his glory in front of them); and they will be called sons of God (they will be princes and princesses in God's kingdom, part of his very family, accepted and held close by him).

What all of these reasons have in common that they are about the future - in fact, they are promises about the future. They promise that God will deliver on justice and peace and mercy: and those who long for those things are truly happy, because they can rest secure in the hope that God will do as he says. Even their own mistakes and regrets and wrongdoings will not restrict God's promise: they too will receive mercy.

So that's who Jesus thinks is happy, and why it is that they are happy; but how does this reversal of fortune occur? Recall the point I made that Jesus is not just the deliverer of the message, but is part of the message he has come to deliver. And this is what the rest of the story of Jesus tells us.

It is not an impressive story in a lot of ways. As Christmas reminds us, he came to earth in the meekest of circumstances - born among animals of parents who were from out-of-town Nazareth. Though his countrymen were looking for a military hero, he refused to take up arms against the Romans, and instead urged his fellow Jews to "turn the other cheek." He reminded us that the real problem is that we have a heart that strayed from God, a heart that is no longer pure. It is all very well to say "Blessed are the pure in heart," but who among us could claim membership of this group?

So, finally, it is a story that seemed to end in weakness and mourning. He was given a show trial, beaten and put to death by hanging on a cross. His friends - the people to whom Jesus's promise of beatitude was first addressed - were themselves disillusioned and despondent.

But the promise of God that Jesus had spoken still lived. On the first Easter Sunday, Jesus walked free from his grave, much to the astonishment of his enemies and even his friends. For his death was not just the execution of a Jewish revolutionary: in his death, Jesus as God's own Son turned aside God's just wrath against sin and evil, making peace with God a reality for human beings, making an offer of mercy from God available to all who accept it. In this death, all these promises are guaranteed. The happiness of the people of God was secured there and then. It is thus Jesus's death that makes sense of his words: "Blessed are the poor in Spirit," "Blessed are those who mourn" and so on.

And what kind of happiness is it? It is bound up with the feeling of liberty that comes through the forgiveness of sins. It is the joy of seeing wrongs righted and justice done. It is the great uprush of happiness at a declaration of peace. It is the delight of finding oneself accepted by God and a member of his family. It is the bliss of a security no human invention can give.

The art of joy

The Scriptural word for this happiness is joy; and the key to it is hope. The announcement of the gospel of forgiveness is the declaration of hope in our time. It isn't given to us now in its complete form, of course. We still inhabit the age in which these things are not delivered; but they are promised.

And this is vital to the Christian experience of the present. For David Malouf, happiness is almost a delusion we had better be done with; for if we consider what the world is really like then we won't be happy. On one level, he's not wrong: the world in which we live is a miserable place in many respects. And if it isn't miserable for me then it is wretched for someone else. It is no use denying the fact of suffering. It is there. We know grief and loss and pain.

It is important to realize that the Christian faith is not in denial about suffering. However much we might pray for healing or financial security, these things are not guaranteed us in this life. But the Christian has learnt both how to recognize the tragedy of the current human situation and how to rejoice in expectation of the coming of God to bring justice, peace and mercy.

"Consider it pure joy," writes James, "when you suffer all kinds of trials." What extraordinary advice. It isn't simply a piece of perversity: it is a powerful truth that the Christian can know joy in the midst of calamity and through the veil of tears.

Thus the art of Christian joy, I'd suggest, has four components:

• It is to celebrate the goodness of the Creator in the goodness of his creation. The Sabbath rest of God, in which he delights in the creation, is the sign to us that the Creator is pleased with all that he has made. The pleasure we take in the world is not incidental to it, but recognized by God himself. To be joyful, then, we need to practice seeing the world with the eyes of the original creator. Despite its brokenness, it is deeply good. When we recognize and experience its goodness, we are not deluded.
• It is to know the grace of God for the forgiveness of sins in the cross of Jesus Christ. To know this means to practice coming to the cross and believing in the good news declared there. It means actually believing the declaration of Paul in the Letter to the Romans, that "there is then no condemnation for those in Christ."
• It is to fix your gaze upon the risen and ascended Jesus Christ, who speaks to the Father on our behalf. Our confidence grows because in Christ we are not fragile or insecure. God is present to us and we are to him, in Christ. Whatever may come, we have a great expectation of what is ahead of us. As it says in the Letter to the Hebrews: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart."
• Finally, it is to live as though evil and suffering, and even death, will not have the last word. That is not to deny that evil, suffering and death are part of our experience. Some religions and even some forms of Christian faith do most certainly live in denial of these things. The pastoral disaster that this leads to is obvious: if we believe we are promised a life without suffering and sadness, then how do we account for it when it comes? Instead, we are able to name what suffering and evil really are, and weep with those who weep. But we can weep in the extraordinary hope that in the end there will be no more weeping.

Michael Jensen is rector of St Mark's Anglican Church, Darling Point, and author of My God, My God: Is it Possible to Believe Anymore?