We are the Menu

We’ve noticed before that the sacrifices of God are spoken of in the Old Testament as the “bread” of God. God consumes these sacrifices as they are offered up in smoke on the altars of Israel. But every sacrifice began by laying hands on the head of the animal: the point was that the worshipper identified himself with the animal. Therefore when the animal was killed, the worshipper symbolically was killed. When the animal was consumed by God in fire and smoke, the worshipper was covenantally consumed by God in the fire and smoke. In other words, the bread of God was never really the blood and fat of goats and rams. The bread of God has always been his own faithful people. Therefore Paul says “For we being many are one bread and one body, for we are all partakers of that one bread” (1 Cor. 10:17) In other words, in the act of eating we are being eaten. As we consume the bread of the Eucharist, we are enacting and symbolizing the one loaf, the bread of God. It is in this sense that the Eucharist can be spoken of rightly as a sacrifice. Not a bloody sacrifice, not (god forbid) a re-sacrifice of Christ on the cross. But a true sacrifice, what all those Old Covenant shadows pointed to in Christ: union and communion with the Triune God. So come consume and thereby be consumed. Eat the bread and thereby become the bread. Our God is a consuming fire, and we are the menu.