When the question of “trading insults” comes up, one of the first things we should see is how the false assumption of neutrality has crept into our thinking. An insult is not simple invective, detached from questions of truth.
When two football teams play, we require a level playing field, a penalty for one team is a penalty for the other, both get the same number of points for doing the same thing, and so on. This is because the game of football is neutral with regard to which team wins. The rulebook doesn’t care.
But collisions between Christ and the Pharisees are not a football game, where both sides have to observe the same requirements. In a football game, both teams are prohibited from clipping, for example. But in the exchanges between Christ and the Pharisees, He gets to call them blind guides, and they do not get to call Him a blind guide. This is because of a little thing we call the truth. When He says it about them, the statement is true. Were they to say it about Him, it would be false and blasphemous. And we can see how far gone we are. True? False? These are strange words.