Mar 2:26 How he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and did eat the shewbread, which is not lawful to eat but for the priests, and gave also to them which were with him?

This verse balances our physical needs (symbolized by the bread of the temple) against social prohibitions. Notice that while Christ accepts religious authority, he sees it as a legitimate social power not as necessarily representing God's will. Christ never condemns the rules of tradition but he is putting them into a larger framework of virtue consisting of our physical responsibilities, our intellectual responsibilities, and our emotional responsibilities, which include our social responsibilities.

Christ in many parts of the Gospels defines a virtuous man as one who honors the law, both civil law and religion traditions. However, his "good news" is that the law isn't all that there is. We have an eternal life beyond our temporal one. Our temporal life has physical, mental, and emotional needs, but the real purpose of our temporal life is to make progress in our eternal life, that is, our new life under the universal rule or kingdom of heaven. The good news is we can be freed from our errors in our temporal life by getting our priorities straight.

Christ is saying that we can act locally, accepting the local prohibition in our physical life, and globally, accepting that God wants us to realize that there are higher goals, which upon certain occasions, can and should come first.

These higher goals are not just "serviing God," which is always a mystery and an egotistic claim made by those who don't understand that our personal relationship with God is a private matter. Sometimes those higher goals are simply our physical needs, which, even though they are our most basic and common desire, are no less God given. The need for bread is surpassed by our need from God, but the life in the bread is also a gift from God and makes it different thant a plain stone. This is not about our desires (thelo in Greek) but our needs (chreia , see the previous verse), which are necessities.

Christ separates religion, that is, the public expression of a specific tradition from our true faith which is express only in our personal relationship with God. Our personal relationship is hidden as God is hidden and as our personal thoughts are hidden from all but God. The "shewbread" of this verse is literally the bread that was put on public display in the temple as an offering to God but which was eaten by the priests. The word used in Greek to describe it means "to place in public." In this verse, our private needs and the private needs of our fellows both are given a priority over such public displays. Christ does not ever say that public religious displays are worthless (poneros, the word translated as "evil" in the Gospels) and more than he says social law is worthless. They are simply of a lower priority.

What is worthless is respecting neither religious tradition, social law, or our physical, mental, or emotional needs for other desires.

"Bread" is from artos (artos), which means specifically a "cake of whole wheat break," and generally "loaf," and "bread."

"Shew" is from prothesis (prothesis), which means "to place in public," "to lay out," "proposed," "purpose," "public notice," "supposition," "calculation," and "proposition."

"Eat" is from phago (phago), which is a form of the word, phagein, which means to eat," "to eat up," and "to devour." A synonym for esthiô (esthio).

"Lawful" is exesti (exesti), which means "to be allowed," "is possible," and "to be in one's power."