Jesus told the crowds:

13 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows’ houses, and as a pretense you make long prayers. Therefore you will receive greater condemnation.

14 “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you shut up the Kingdom of Heaven against men; for you don’t enter in yourselves, neither do you allow those who are entering in to enter. 15 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel around by sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much of a son of Gehenna§ as yourselves.

16 “Woe to you, you blind guides, who say, ‘Whoever swears by the temple, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the temple, he is obligated.’ 17 You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifies the gold? 18 ‘Whoever swears by the altar, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gift that is on it, he is obligated?’ 19 You blind fools! For which is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifies the gift? 20 He therefore who swears by the altar, swears by it, and by everything on it. 21 He who swears by the temple, swears by it, and by him who was living in it. 22 He who swears by heaven, swears by the throne of God, and by him who sits on it.”

Matthew 23:13-22 - World English Bible

In Matthew 23:1-12, Jesus criticized the scribes and Pharisees primarily for their self-interest and social climbing. Now, he shifted his ire to a series of woes concerning their rulings on the Law. In the first four of the series, he chided them for their rigidity over mercy:

• Legal judgments that drove widows further into poverty, only to to covered over by lengthy prayers.
• Lifestyle entanglements that drew both themselves and their followers away from faith in the Kingdom.
• Proselytizing even in the Diaspora, encouraging a zealous spirit in the convert that shut out any sense of compassion.
• Minuet rulings on solemn oaths to YHWH that were more concerned with how one promised God then the gravity of a relationship with God.

Notice Jesus did not condemn the scribes and Pharisees for making rulings, but for the overarching importance of those legal findings. Court opinions and precedences neither comprised nor defined faith; they were only a means to an end, a deepening relationship with God. If they got in the way of trust, they and their authors were useless.

Faith is a matter of balance between orthodoxy (faith defined in dogmas) and orthopraxy (faith in action). Both point us toward God, but should not loom so large in life as to take us away from our Lord. Faith lost in the details is no faith at all.

Have you ever found yourself lost in the details of faith, only to lose sight of compassion for others?