Micah 3:1-3: And I said, Hear now, heads of Jacob and rulers of the house of Israel.  Is it not for you to know justice?  You who hate good and love evil, who tear off their skin from them and their flesh from their bones, and who eat the flesh of my people, strip off their skin from them, break their bones, and chop them up as for the pot and as meat for the kettle.

In the early centuries of Christian history, pagans repeatedly accused Christians of blasphemies and outrages.  Christians were guilty of incest because they called each other brother and sister and greeted one another with a kiss.  Christians were atheists because they refused to do homage to the gods.  And Christians were cannibals because they ate the flesh and drank the blood of the God-man they worshiped.

Pagans weren’t the first to be offended by the Eucharist.  When Jesus told the Jews that He was the true bread come down from heaven; when He announced that He was giving His flesh for food and His blood to drink, the Jews reacted with disgust.  “How can this man give us His flesh to eat?”  After that sermon, many of His disciples left Him and no longer walked with Him.

We recoil at the suggestion.  We want to explain.  We want to qualify.  This isn’t cannibalism.  We’re not eating His actual flesh and blood.   We’re eating His Spiritual flesh and blood.  We’re actually only eating bread and drinking wine.  See?

However valid those explanations, we have to admit that Jesus was flirting with impropriety.  If we had designed the Lord’s Supper, we would have made it a lot clearer that we’re not talking about a cannibal feast.  Why did God leave things so blurry?

Part of the answer is that all sacrifice is ultimately human sacrifice.  On the day that you eat, you shall die, the Lord told Adam, and that demand remained after Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden.  Yahweh told Abraham to offer his son Isaac, and the temple was built on the very Mount Moriah where a ram took Isaac’s place.  Every sacrificial animal brought to the temple was another Isaac, a substitute son, a symbolic human being.  But these were all shadows, signs of the real sacrifice, signs of the sacrifice of the God-man Jesus.  That human sacrifice is the sacrifice we celebrate at this table.

Another part of the answer is that despite appearances this meal is fundamentally the opposite of the feast of cannibal kings.  Jesus is the final sacrifice, the perfect human sacrifice demanded since Eden, but He offered Himself as that sacrifice. We didn’t seize the Shepherd, kill Him, and feast on Him.  He laid His life down so that He could give us life, so that He could be our food and drink.  We are kings, but not cannibal kings who feed on the sheep; we are kings who receive the body and blood of the Shepherd so that we can follow Him in His self-sacrifice.