Christianity can answer the question: why does evil exist in the world? The root of the answer lies in our free will. As God is free, so he chose to create us with freedom. Our freedom lies in a choice: to walk closer to the Lord, or to walk away from the Lord. The world functions as an arena for our choice.

To walk closer to the Lord involves the choice of love. We realize God loves us and we love him in return. In the choice of love, we extend our love to others. The world becomes the means to exercise love.

However, freely chosen love involves the risk of rejection. We can chose the self over all others. The world, then can become a means to reject others. We have seen this rejection many times over the past century in the suffering of the innocent.

God does not infringe on our free will. Indeed, to allow us the opportunity to repent, God gives us the chance and the choice to harden our hearts. But, God even uses our rejection as the opportunity for greater good, as he did with the death and resurrection of Jesus.

If we ask “why is there evil in the world?” we must also ask “why is there good in the world?” While we may not be able to answer the question of evil on a physical level, certainly we can answer it on a moral level. The moral and the immoral live in the same world, because God created the world as the means to exercise moral freedom. Evil may induce despair, but good inspires hope. Only hope based upon the choice of love can ultimately answer the scandal of evil in the world.

Jesus was sent by the Father to sow the seeds of the kingdom in his ministry on earth. Surely, the sowing did not involve only his verbal teaching. His life, his every act, particularly his dying and rising, became a proclamation of Good News for the whole world. In him was the kingdom of God inaugurated. It began to be realized in his being born into this world. Then, he sent his disciples (and all who would come after them) to continue the sowing of that seed by which the kingdom would come about for the whole universe. The Church, you and me, are now responsible for the sowing and for the harvesting. What that means is that our families and our parishes are responsible for that work.

The work of evangelization has been assigned to the community of believers who come after Christ. None of us can claim to be exempt from that charge. It is a task laid upon each of us: to make known the good news that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior of the universe.

Our Holy Father, Pope Francis, travels all over the world in the work of evangelizing. He does not cease ever to proclaim the truth that is in Jesus Christ. He says that he comes as a pilgrim pope or father. He comes to confirm the local churches in their ministry of evangelizing. To all the churches has been entrusted the task of sowing the seed of the word of God in all hearts. The pope wants to re- sow that seed in our hearts and in the hearts of all persons of good will. No soil is unworthy of his zeal and of his energy.

Professional missionaries, clergy, religious, and laity go out to the whole world to announce that Jesus Christ loves all people. Professionals and volunteers in the parishes have all kinds of ways of announcing the Good News. Homilies, catechism classes, all faith-formation efforts, youth ministry, outreach to the poor and to the needy, ministries of presence and of compassion: Jesus is made present in the sacred works that come from our witness. The local parish, the faith-sharing group to which you belong, the family within which you live, all are agents of evangelization, of seed-sowing and of harvesting. Every Christian community needs to be an apostolic community, one that bears the Word to others in some way.

We are never limited by our personal or corporate inadequacies. The word of God will accomplish the purposes for which it was sent. Ours is only to spread it far and wide and to leave the rest to the Lord. There will surely be obstacles to the growth. Pray that we ourselves do not become those obstacles.