Most of the parables Jesus tells are stories. Today’s parables are just brief images. They have the Lord’s characteristic absurdity. You have a blind man being led by another blind man. And you have an eye surgeon who is going to remove a splinter from a patient; but the surgeon has a beam sticking out of his eye, the kind of long board you’d pick up at a lumberyard. This is camels going through eyes of needles kind of stuff, or a farmer who just throws the seed everywhere. Jesus uses absurdity and hyperbole to make the point: Blind people shouldn’t lead the parade, and people with logs in their eyes shouldn’t be surgeons. He applies that to life in the church. Deal with your own blindness. Deal with the beam in your own eye.

What’s happened in recent years, though, is the splinter and the plank have been reinterpreted to mean little sins and big sins.