"I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.
For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life - namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again."
- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
“Love the sinner and hate the sin” really means this: love all sinners and hate all sins, without partiality and without prejudice. This is the way of life that Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount. When this teaching is followed, it is revolutionary.
- Joshua Nickel
Archbishop Fulton Sheen: Wedding at Cana
One of the most amazing features of this marriage is that it was not the wine servant, whose business it was to service the wine, who noticed the shortage, but rather Our Blessed Mother. (She notes our needs before we ourselves feel them.) She made a very simple prayer to her Divine Son about the empty wine pots when she said: “They have no wine.” Hidden in the words was not only a consciousness of the power of her Divine Son, but also an expression of her desire to remedy an awkward situation. Perhaps the Blessed Mother had already seen Our Lord work many miracles in secret-although He had not yet worked a single one in public. For if there had not already been a consciousness of the truth that He was the Son of the Omnipotent God, she would not have asked for a miracle. Some of the greatest miracles of the world have similarly been done through the influence of a mother: “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.”
The answer of Our Blessed Lord was, “Woman what is that to me? My hour is not yet come.”
Note that Our Lord said: “My hour is not yet come.” Whenever Our Blessed Lord used that expression, “hour,” it was in relation to His Passion and His Death. For example, the night that Judas crossed the brook of Cedron to blister His lips with a kiss, Our Lord said: “This is your hour and the powers of darkness.” A few hours before, when seated at His Last Supper on earth and anticipating His Death, He said: “Father, the hour is come. Glorify Thy Son with the glory that He had with Thee before the foundations of the world were laid.” Earlier, when a crowd attempted to take His Life by stoning, Scriptures say: “His hour was not yet come.” Our Blessed Lord was obviously, at Cana, saying that the hour in which He was to reveal Himself had not yet come according to His Father’s appointment. And yet, implicit in Mary’s statement was a request that He actually begin it. Scriptures tell us: “So in Cana of Galilee, Jesus began His miracles, and made known the glory that was within Him, so that His disciples learned to believe in Him.” (John 2:11.)
In our own language, Our Lord was saying to His Blessed Mother: “My dear Mother, do you realize that you are asking me to proclaim my Divinity - to appear before the world as the Son of God, and to prove my Divinity by my works and my miracles? The moment that I do this, I begin the royal road to the Cross. When I am no longer known among men as the son of the carpenter, but as the Son of God, that will be my first step toward Calvary. My hour is not yet come; but would you have me anticipate it? Is it your will that I go to the Cross? If I do this, your relationship to me changes. You are now my mother. You are known everywhere in our little village, as the ‘Mother of Jesus.’ But if I appear now as the Saviour of men, and begin the work of Redemption, your role will change too. Once I undertake the salvation of mankind, you will not only be my mother, but you will also be the mother of everyone whom I redeem. I am the Head of humanity; as soon as I save the body of humanity you, who are the mother of the Head, become also the mother of the body. You will then be the universal mother, the new Eve, as I am the new Adam.
“To indicate the role that you will play in Redemption, I now bestow upon you that title of universal motherhood; I call you - Woman. It was to you that I referred when I said to Satan that I would put enmity between him and the Woman, between his brood of evil and your seed, Which I am. That great title of Woman I dignify you with now. And I shall dignify you with it again when my hour comes and when I am unfurled upon the Cross, like a wounded eagle. We are in this work of Redemption together. What is yours is mine. From this hour on, we are not just Mary and Jesus, we are the new Adam and the new Eve, beginning a new humanity, changing the water of sin into the wine of life. Knowing all this, my dear Mother, is it your will that I anticipate the Cross and that I go to Calvary?” Our Blessed Lord was presenting to Mary not merely the choice of asking for a miracle or not; rather He was asking if she would send Him to His death. He had made it quite plain that the world would not tolerate His Divinity - that if He turned water into wine, some day wine would be changed into blood. The answer of Mary was one of complete cooperation in the Redemption of Our Blessed Lord, as she spoke for the last time in Sacred Scripture. Turning to the wine steward she said, “Whatsoever He shall say to you, that do ye.” (John 2:5.) What a magnificent valedictory! As Our Blessed Lord had said that He had come on earth to do His Father’s Will, so Mary bade us do the Will of her Divine Son. “Whatsoever He shall say to you, that do ye.” The waterpots are filled, are brought to Our Blessed Lord, and then, in the magnificent lines of the poet, Richard Crashaw, “The unconscious waters saw their God, and blushed.”
The first lesson from Cana is: “Aid yourself and Heaven will aid you.” Our Lord could have produced wine out of nothing, as He had made the world from nothing, but He willed that the wine servants bring their pots and fill them with water. We must not expect God to transform us without our bringing something to be transformed. In vain do we say: “O Lord, help me overcome my evil habits or let me be sober, pure, and honest.” What good are these prayers unless we bring at least our own efforts? God will, indeed, make us peaceful and happy again, but only on condition that we bring the water of our own feeble efforts. We are not to remain passive, while awaiting the manifestation of God’s power; there must be the indispensable gesture of our own liberty, even though it brings to God something as unspirited as the routine waters of our insipid lives! Collaboration with God is essential if we are to become the sons of God.
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