Now when he was at Jerusalem, at the pasch, upon the festival day, many believed in his name, seeing his signs which he did. But Jesus did not trust himself unto them, for that he knew all men, And because he needed not that any should give testimony of man: for he knew what was in man.
(John 2:23-25)
From Bible commentary by Bishop Juan Straubinger (quoted and translated here):
“When we are still unfamiliar with the language of the divine Master and the Bible in general, it is surprising to constantly find a certain pessimism, which seems excessive, regarding the wickedness of man. Because we think that people who act out of love for evil must be very rare. Our surprise stems from ignoring the immense scope of the first of the biblical dogmas: original sin. The Church has defined it in very clear terms (Denzinger 174-200). Our upbringing, with its mixture of proud humanism and materialistic sentimentality, leads us to confuse the natural order with the supernatural, and to think that it is charitable to believe in the goodness of man, when in fact such a belief lies the Pelagian heresy, the same as that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the origin of so many contemporary evils.
It is not that man wakes up every day thinking of doing evil for pure pleasure.] Man is not only naturally given over to his own depraved inclinations (which were not erased by Baptism), but he is also surrounded by a world hostile to the Gospel and exposed to the influence of the Evil One, who teaches and leads him to evil under the guise of good. This is the “mystery of lawlessness,” which St. Paul explains in 2 Thessalonians 2:6. Therefore, we all need to be born again (3:3ff.) and constantly renewed in spirit through contact with the divine Person of the only Savior, Jesus, by means of the gift He gives us of His Word and His redeeming Body and Blood. Hence the constant need to watch and pray so as not to enter into temptation, for as soon as we enter, we are overcome. Jesus thus gives us a lesson of immense value for the healthy knowledge and distrust of ourselves and others, and reveals the abysses of human blindness and iniquity, which are impenetrable enigmas for thinkers and sociologists of our day, but which are explained with transparent clarity in the Gospel. For those who have understood this, humility becomes luminous, desirable, and easy. See the Magnificat (Luke 1:46ff.) and Psalm 50 and notes.”
