Luke 11 verses 40-41. “You foolish people! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? But give what is inside the dish to the poor, and everything will be clean for you.”
We all know of people who are preoccupied with religious symbols and rituals; sometimes to the extent that they neglect the moral duties to which these symbols pointed. In the Old Testament God often gave some help to Israel, by giving them symbolic rituals, like washing, to back up His demand for moral and spiritual cleanness.
But human nature is a strange thing. The Pharisees extended the simple demand of God into scores of additional rules that had no biblical warrant at all. They then thought that anyone who broke one of the additional rules, which they had implemented, was tantamount to breaking the original law which God gave. So when Jesus ignored their man-made law of ritual ablution before eating they were terribly shocked and they thought that Christ was not truly a holy man. Note, that this washing of hands had nothing to do with hygiene but rather with religious ritual.
Mankind is incurably religious. And if the light of the Gospel has not reached the heart and mind, we will develop our own form of religion which is usually based on things we do for acceptance with God: in the case of the Pharisees it is a set of rituals rather than a life of inner morality and humility.
How interesting it is to see how people can get things so wrong when it comes to God.
Let us not be fooled.