“You blind guides, filtering out a gnat while swallowing down a camel!”
Blindness is simply lack of sight, but it is more than optics. Blindness can be total or selective. Blindness can occur when they eyes have 20/20 vision. Blindness can be a choice, an avoidance behavior, a coping mechanism, a darkness sought out between bright lights. Blindness can result from sharpened focus, staring at brilliant beams of intuition.
Jesus addresses blindness in leaders as a particularly destructive form of non-sight because leadership blindness blocks out revelation for more than the leader. He is speaking of the inspiration, influence, and impact of leadership blindness.
Ignoring initializes ignorance. Ignorance is the the absence of information, but ignorance can occur through the ignoring of the obvious, ignoring available information.
In this instance, Jesus addresses the fatal flaws of an intellectual filtering process that allows camels while piling up collections of tiny gnats. Tweezering gnats from the piles for closer observation while digesting the camels you gulped down, suffering extreme indigestion, yet proclaiming, “Wow! Good thing we didn’t eat these gnats. We might die!” Imagine the X-ray of this leader holding the finest filter full of gnats, bulging midriff filled with a camel carcass.
