I like to cook. Lorraine and I like to cook together. We unwind sometimes with me chopping onions, leeks, shallots, anything in the allium family, and Lorraine roasting a mélange of root vegetables—potatoes, beets, fennel, carrots, parsnips—tossed in olive oil, homegrown herbs and sea salt.

We like to read books about food and go to websites and blogs related to food—growing it, cooking it, eating it. “Are you a foody?” one of my small group members asked, after we had served them a meal. “I don’t think so, but I’m not sure,” I replied. He and his wife both said, “Yes, you’re a foody.”

I think I’m too cheap to be one of those. I’ve never purchased a restaurant meal that would cost the same as my first home mortgage payment. We try to figure out how many different meals can we get out of a roasted chicken. Usually, we prefer preparing our own special dinners at home rather than dining out. With our anniversary and birthdays coming up, it’s time to start searching for what we want to cook or eat.

Kings and rulers have an altered relationship with food. They have to think about things differently. There is a word that describes the difference. That word is poison.

If something we cook goes bad, it’s not on purpose. We don’t put poison in dinner. But heads of state with enemies can’t necessarily be so sure that their food won’t kill them.

What’s a king or despot to do?

Consider the Beefeaters at the Tower of London.

“We know that King Henry VIII executed two of his wives on Tower Green at the Tower,” says Mick King, who began working as a Yeoman Warder (Beefeater) at the Tower in May 2000. “Both these wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, had supporters, Henry was paranoid that he would be poisoned, so he had his Royal Bodyguard to taste his food first.”

Vladimir Putin’s enemy Yevgeny Prigozhin, the one who was just killed in a plane crash outside Moscow, first connected with Putin as his chef. They were not always enemies. Imagine the lives saved if Prigozhin had just dropped a little arsenic in the borscht or used the wrong kind of mushroom in the stroganoff.

Did Putin make Prigozhin, or someone else now, taste his food before he eats it? What kind of anxiety does a human leader have to live with?

Another despotic leader, Idi Amin, reportedly almost killed his chef and the whole cooking team one time because his son got indigestion. “If my son dies, I’m going to kill all of you,” Amin allegedly threatened.

There are some plus sides to the job. Mick the Beefeater pointed out that, “We have always lived inside the grounds with our families, people outside these great walls were jealous in the Middle Ages as they couldn’t afford good meat, they were eating vegetables and fish from the River Thames. We the Yeoman Warders were eating the scraps and leftovers from the Kings Table in the great halls of the White Tower, the good meat, the good beef.”

Guilt over wrongdoing and a desire to protect one’s right royal self from harm would make a lot of people lose their appetite. Guilt would surely eat away at the edges of royalty brought about by the death of others. And to eat the scraps at the table, like the Beefeaters or the dogs in the Gospel, was better than the alternative for most people.

We Commoners also have a Beefeater or actually someone who makes the Beefeater look like a Commoner. Jesus is the Beefeater who not only tastes our food but eats it all especially when it is not safe to eat. He looked deeply into the cup of wrath, shuddered, prayed, then drank it all, every sin, every dreg of humankind, dying, satisfying God’s judgment on us.

Jesus is so much more than we can imagine. He is king, beefeater, chef and food. Jesus is heaven’s bread and drink—Living Water, Bread of Life.

It was right after the woman at the well had left with her water jug, that Jesus’ disciples began to urge him to eat. John 4:32-34 records Jesus’ response, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.”

No meal at the well, but soon the disciples and a small intimate gathering of 5,000 or so would enjoy fine dining of loaves and fishes. Yet, Jesus, points to himself, the bread unlike the bread we humans eat, and invites his disciples to “eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

The king eats the food we’ve earned and dies for commoners like us. He gives us life beyond death.

Draw near to the table. Eat more than the scraps that fall from the table, but the bread and wine broken for us. This food unites when the leeks of Egypt divide. Jesus food ushers us from earthly kingdoms to heaven itself.