What did Jesus say about religious hypocrisy?

On this subject my recorded words are among my most direct — and most searching. Let me give you the heart of it. The core complaint is about the gap between outward performance and inward reality. As I said to the Pharisees at a dinner, recorded in Luke's Gospel: “Now you Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the platter, but your inward part is full of extortion and wickedness” The image is simple: a cup scrubbed on the outside but filthy within is still a dirty cup. Religion that performs virtue without practicing it is the same kind of fraud. Matthew records me going further in the temple courts, where I called out those who make elaborate public displays — broadening their prayer-boxes, lengthening their tassels, seeking the best seats — while laying crushing burdens on ordinary people they refuse to help carry. The principle I stated there is blunt: “they say, and don't do” The sharpest image I used was the whitened tomb — beautiful on the surface, full of dead bones within. What makes hypocrisy so dangerous is that it doesn't just harm the hypocrite; as I said in Luke, “you took away the key of knowledge. You didn't enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in, you hindered” The remedy is not less religion, but religion worked from the inside out.