You disregard God's commandment but cling to human tradition.
The Pharisees tended to prioritize the parts of the law that dealt with externals and appearances, things easily within their control. Their insistence on ritual washing before meals could have been a decent idea, expanding something required for priests to the entire people. It could have been helpful if it had not stopped at external washing but served as a reminder for the need of inward purification. It could have given the Jews a sense of shared identity during the Roman persecution. But instead it served to enlarge the pride of those who did it, seeing themselves as superior to those who did not. The disciples of Jesus may have neglected this particular external act, but sought inner purification through genuine repentance. This couldn't help but chafe at the Pharisees who couldn't stand to see their own supposed expertise ignored.
'If someone says to father or mother,
"Any support you might have had from me is qorban"'
(meaning, dedicated to God),
you allow him to do nothing more for his father or mother.
Since it was easier to give money to the support the temple than to actually care for one's aging parents the Pharisees would make a sacred pledge of their money to the temple so that nothing more could be asked of them. Having made a vow of qorban their money was encumbered and could not be used for other purposes. In this way they used an act of religiosity to mask their disobedience to the commandment to honor one's father and mother. Obviously the commandment should have taken priority, but the Pharisees used the religious veneer of a sacred vow to conceal their sin of omission.
And there are many other things that they have traditionally observed,
the purification of cups and jugs and kettles and beds.
It almost seems like the Pharisees tried to keep themselves so occupied with external and ritual things that they didn't have the time or the mental space to recon with their unconverted and hardened hearts. It was as though skipping any step in the process exposed cracks that suggested that not everything was as rosey with them as they publicly presented it.
For those of us who rely on liturgy and habit to help sustain our own life of faith we must remember that if these become merely external they lose their potency for us. We are in fact meant to cling to the traditions of the Church (see Second Thessalonians 2:15). But we ought not merely say prayers without engaging our minds. And we ought not, for instance, become so preoccupied with liturgical correctness that we forget the central thing that happens in every validly celebrated liturgy. A habit of regular prayer can be a wonderful thing. And concern for the dignity of the liturgy is incumbent on all Catholics, simply because Jesus deserves our best. But anything can become a distraction. And distractions can become the routines by which we convince ourselves that all is well even when all of us, while this life lasts, remain in need of inward growth and purification. As Genesis reminds us, we were made in the image, and after the likeness of God himself. But this image tends to get buried under layers upon layers of sediment. This is why we have prayer and the sacraments. Not to tick boxes on a to do list, but rather to reveal the image buried beneath the detritus.
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