Then the disciples came, and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended, when they heard this saying?” '
The disciples then approached Jesus and explained to Him that He had ‘offended' the Pharisees. They had clearly not dared to face Him with it, for they could not confute what He said, and they were afraid that He might say more. But they spoke loudly enough behind His back. His words had, as it were, ‘tripped them up' and ‘made them stumble' (skandalizo), with the result that they were furiously angry. The disciples were concerned because they had still not fully lost their awe of the Pharisees and the Scribes, for from earliest days they had been brought up to respect and admire them as godly men. Thus they possibly felt that Jesus was offending them unnecessarily. But Jesus knew that what was now in the balance was the whole of what He had come to do. There was no question of compromise here.
The Pharisees and Scribes were at this stage taking Judaism up a side road of ritualistic practise that could only lead to a dead end of total sterility, something that they were partly saved from by the destruction of Jerusalem which brought about a total rethink of their position, and probably, although they would have hated to admit it, partly by the influence of Jesus, for some would certainly have taken note of His strictures and recognised the truth in them sufficiently to partly revise their views, even if not wholly. Thus while ritual still retained great importance, they did not in the end lose sight of the importance of moral behaviour towards non-Jews.