Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus calls the Pharisees hypocrites because they “disregard God’s commandment but cling to human tradition.”
For instance: “If someone says to father or mother, ‘Any support you might have had from me is qorban’ [meaning, dedicated to God], you allow him to do nothing more for his father or mother.” If you claim to be a person of love but fail to honor your parents, something is seriously off. Thus the hypocrisy of the Pharisees is a disregard of love.
In its essence, love is an act of the will—more precisely, the willing of the good of the other as other. To love is really to want what is good for someone else and then to act on that desire.
Real love is a leaping outside of the narrow confines of my needs and desires and an embrace of the other’s good for the other’s sake. It is an escape from the black hole of the ego, which tends to draw everything around it into itself.