Eamonn Clark

I saw that Middlebury College is in the news again. For being totally insane. (The last time we heard about Middlebury was after the violent protests when Charles Murray spoke.) It seems some conservative Polish politician was supposed to give a lecture there, and being a conservative Pole, does not find much to praise in the LGBTQ+ agenda. Naturally, the screeching commenced, and the lecture was downgraded to a live stream for one politics class.

The Middlebury newspaper has a “trending” feed. As I write, this story currently takes the bottom two of five spots. The top three are occupied by two reports of a story of a professor who asked a question about the Holocaust on a chemistry exam, and one about a geology professor who showed a cartoon about slavery. Are you seeing a pattern?

Some might say this is unique to this generation. In one sense that’s right, but in another sense it is not. While the particular issues which occupy the minds of liberal academes and younglings in the West are indeed mostly novel, I don’t think the widespread existence of “snowflakes” is a new phenomenon at all. I think we are reading the accounts of ancient snowflakery in the Passion narratives. The scribes and Pharisees (etc.) had a rigid attachment to the Mosaic law, which was read in light of their own very human interpretive tradition. They are unwilling to hear that they are wrong. They have very particular fixations which warp their priorities and view of the world beyond what reason allows. They ask trick questions. They have gained all the power (and money) in Jerusalem and will use that power in violence when reason fails, such as with a mob. They are entitled. They seek attention. They manipulate the court system in various ways to ensure their desired outcome. They engage in “outrage culture.” They will expel those from their group who dare to think for themselves. They will destroy or conceal or distort evidence which threatens their ideology. They are hypocrites. They are basically out of touch with reality, especially the supernatural. And so on.

“Ah, yes, but it is so obvious that a man is not a woman, that abortion is murder, and so on. So today’s snowflakes are worse.” Not quite. Consider the fact that there is no challenge against the reality of the miracles of Jesus on the part of the Pharisees and their ilk. They accept that He has been healing people, raising them from the dead, etc., and that He Himself rose from the dead. It should be obvious that this is God Himself, and yet they plot and conspire to defeat Him to protect their own selfish and twisted ideology. They are seeing and hearing the same things as the first disciples, and yet they are drawing wildly different conclusions, conclusions at odds with the most basic common-sense application of spiritual thinking. But they are so blinded by their own prejudices that they cannot accept that the Christ is something other than what they expected. The introduction of the Logos Himself into the midst of the chaotic spiritual waters has caused a splash – or, if you like, the Light has melted the rabbinic snowflakes of Jerusalem.

We all have weakened and darkened souls. We all have our own anti-Christic attachments which need to be rectified. We are all shaken by the scandal of the Cross in one way or another, when we consider it rightly.

There is no room for boasting. We are all cosmic snowflakes.

Have an edifying Good Friday.