NOTES for Mar 7:5-16
Jesus clearly distinguishes between Tradition and traditions. His disciples are accused of eating bread without first performing the prescribed ritual washing of hands, although the Torah itself does not require such washing: it was only a tribute to tradition, and a late tradition at that, rooted in the practice of certain Pharisaic teachers.
Meanwhile, such late, purely human traditions, which gratified the religious pride of those who kept them, sometimes became the cause of an actual violation of the commandment, the destruction of the genuine Tradition. Formally, of course, such a violation was entirely justified: the first commandment is greater than the fifth, and the one who strives to keep the first commandment in its fullness is sometimes forced to violate the fifth commandment.
But in this case the issue is plainly something else: using the primacy of the first commandment as a basis for in fact refusing to help elderly parents. Of course, it often turned out to be easier to put a certain sum into the temple treasury than to care for one's parents, and such donations were profitable for the temple leadership as well. It is no surprise that eventually an "adequate" justification was found for this practice, which in essence contradicted the Torah.
But Jesus, of course, sees perfectly all the deceitfulness of the proposed justifications. And He connects it with the very attitude toward Tradition, treating it not as a guide on the path of righteousness that leads into the Kingdom, but as a manual for arranging one's life in moral and religious comfort. He expresses the distinctive feature of such an attitude in two phrases: what defiles a person is not what enters the mouth, but what comes out of the mouth. The external, religious side of life has no relation to spiritual purity. But what happens in the heart does have a relation to it. The most direct and immediate relation.