The Pharisees now start to criticise Jesus' disciples. Since the Babylonian exile the religious leaders had added lots of rules designed to ensure that the Law was kept. The good point behind this was that they realised that their disobedience of the Law was the reason for the exile. The bad side was that people cannot be made good by making lots of laws. These rules were passed on in oral form, and it was about two hundred years later before they took written form in the Mishnah. It was neglect of ceremonial washing before eating that the disciples were being criticised for.
Jesus responds by asking why they focus saw much on their own rules, yet ignore the heart of the law of God, in particular honouring of ones parents. We see here how corrupt the heart of man is, and how rules can never ensure that we honour God. For the corrupt human heart will always end up using rules to get our own way and to do evil. The Ten Commandments were perfectly clear that we should honour our parents, yet the "rules" allowed someone to avoid caring for their parents by declaring that some money was devoted to God.
We too need to be careful on this point. For we can use "loving God first" as an excuse not to look after our families. Now we must love God above all else, and if push comes to shove, we must choose God over parents, wives, children etc. But there are many more instructions in the Word on loving our families than there are on putting God first before our families, and the issue most of the time is that we do not love our families enough or properly.
Never turn loving Christ into a system or a set of rules, this has been tried time and time again and every single time it results in a horrible mess.
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