They tie up heavy burdens hard to carry, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them. After successfully silencing the Pharisees and the Sadducees who had wanted to see him entrapped by his own words (the question about the resurrection), Jesus turned to the crowds to address them. Being that the content of his address was the offices occupied by the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus must have been appalled at how “low” these religious leaders had stooped in their efforts to discredit him. Jesus wanted to speak to the crowd about the hypocrisy of these groups.
Jesus had no problem with the institutional offices because they were part and parcel of the life of his community. Such religious institutions contributed greatly to the uniqueness of the community and there is no doubt that Jesus, as was each and every member of this community, took pride in this fact. And I believe it is this pride he had in the institutions that compelled him to call out on the failure by the men who occupied the offices to live to the expectation of their positions.
Jesus calls the scribes and Pharisees hypocrites, not because they were “fake” or because they were not divinely ordained, but because of their failure to practice what they were teaching (praxis). The scribes and the Pharisees were well versed in the traditions of their community. They had at their fingertips the words of the law which they enjoined on the people to observe. It cannot be doubted that they themselves observed these statutes even as they reminded the people to do likewise. However, the religious leaders had an upper hand when it came to observing the tenets of the law because they did not have to deal with a lot of things in their day-to-day living. The same could not be said of the ordinary members of the community who had to juggle different things at the same time. To the mother who had to go to the well to draw water, then proceed to the market to buy groceries as well as attend to the needs of her children, keeping track of all the tenets of the law, especially those that concerned domestic life, posed a great challenge. Requirements such as the washing of hands after a market trip were elevated and made religious laws even though they had very little to do with religion. And there were hundreds of such laws and regulations. While Jesus might not have advocated for the doing away of such laws, he might have expected that the religious leaders would recognize that all the regulations do not carry the same weight and “re-classified” them for easier observance by the people.