You may have had the Jehovah’s Witnesses come to your door recently. I was meeting with a man this week to plan the Baptism of his daughter and during the meeting the doorbell rang – and it was 2 Jehovah’s Witnesses at the front door of the rectory. They didn’t identify themselves as Jehovah’s Witnesses (I figured it out by their magazine, which although it is no longer called “The Watchtower” on the front cover, is still listed as being from the Watchtower in small print on the back of the magazine). They saw that I was a priest and said that they assumed I was a prayerful person and asked if I was concerned about things in the world getting worse. I said yes, but that I also trusted in God and that if people prayed more and obeyed the commandments things would get better. They agreed and handed me their magazine and asked if they could come by again. I said they were welcome to do so and then went back to the father arranging for his daughter’s baptism.

            The Jehovah’s Witnesses are concerned about the end times – and yet their leaders have repeatedly told them that they were coming – even that King David was going to come back to life. They bought a mansion in San Diego in preparation for King David’s return in 1925 – they even put the mansion’s mortgage in the name of King David. Of course, King David has not arrived at that home yet.

            As Catholics, we live in the same world as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. We can look at the many disasters going on around the world, from the Monsoons in Burma to the earthquakes in China to the tornadoes in the Midwest, and some people claim that it is some type of message from God. Others blame man for these “acts of God.” As people of faith, how do we respond? We know that the Church is one of the biggest dispensers of aid to people in need throughout the world. We make these sacrifices for others because we know that God has been merciful to us, thus we need to be merciful to other people.

            But what message do we share with people in need far away or right next door? We see that the presence of evil in the world has caused great suffering, and yet we can say to people that evil will not have the “last word.” Pope John Paul II, visiting Warsaw, Poland in 1999, after that country had been freed from a half century of Nazism and Communism, reminded the people, “The Paschal mystery of the Death and Resurrection of the Son of God has given a new direction to human history. Though we see in this history the painful signs of the action of evil, we are certain that in the end evil will not prevail over the fate of man and the world. 

            Poland and Eastern Europe became free because people throughout the world joined together and heeded Mary’s call at Fatima to pray for them, to pray for the conversion of Russia and of the entire world. She called upon us to let Her Son’s death and resurrection lead us to true freedom. Although Mary’s promise in 1917 seemed to be hard to believe it would ever be fulfilled, it was. It wasn’t the mighty and powerful who defeated the forces of tyranny. It was sick people in their homes praying the Rosary who caused the Berlin Wall to fall down.

            In the 2^nd reading today St. Paul reminds us of Abraham, our father in faith, the father of the Jewish and Christian peoples. “He did not doubt God’s promise in unbelief; rather, he was strengthened by faith and gave glory to God.” So many of the humble people we know who have difficult lives, but beautiful prayer lives, live out what Paul described in Abraham.

            In Warsaw Pope John Paul reminded the people of the faith that brought them through the darkness of dictatorship (he in part was doing this since once they became free, many did not think that they needed God any more and became to imitate Western Europeans by giving up on God, Church, and morality and started to do “their own thing”). He reminded them that even under the Communists they always had hope, but it was not just a hope to have their political situation changed. Instead, he said, “Our hope penetrates far deeper: it is directed in fact to the divine promises which go far beyond temporal realities. Its definitive object is the sharing in the fruits of the saving work of Christ.”

            In other words, our hope as Christians is really not for good weather or successful sporting events or a good job or health. These are not bad things, and we can ask God for them, but our ultimate goal is to participate in Christ’s salvation. We ourselves and as many people as we can bring to Christ.

“Only the hope which comes from faith in the Resurrection can inspire us to give a worthy response in our daily lives to God’s infinite love. Only with such hope can we go out to the “sick” [as Jesus did] (Mt 9:12) and be apostles of God’s healing love.” We are called to bear witness, as those Jehovah’s Witnesses do, but our witness is not one rooted in fear, but instead rooted in Easter joy. To conclude with what the pope said 9 years ago in Warsaw: Our witness is to be a “witness of active mercy built on faith in the Resurrection. Only this kind of witness is a sign of hope for contemporary man, especially for the younger generations; and if for some it is also a “sign of contradiction”, this contradiction never distracts us from fidelity to the Crucified and Risen Christ.”