We have been considering the fact that God in His kindness feeds His people. And as He does so, He does this as a pattern for us to emulate and follow. The Lord offers us His broken body, and this is a figure that we imitate.
It is not the case that food just appears miraculously at supermarkets. All food is the fruit of sacrifice, and this is a truth that we should not run from or seek to evade. Our bodies cannot be broken in just the same way the Lord’s was—obviously—but we are to imitate Him in all that we do. This is repeatedly urged upon us in the Scriptures.
But we are not just to imitate the Lord generically. Let us imitate how He feeds us in how we feed one another. A husband and father submits to grueling or backbreaking work in order to feed his children. A woman with child submits to the considerable demands placed upon her body so that another might be fed. A nursing mother does the same. Intensive labor in the kitchen, or at the outdoor grill, is a “giving up” that another might eat.
So much that is wrong with our culture is the result of trying to evade this. We want to outsource the sacrifice. The Lord is not like that. Come.