“For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” (1 Corinthians 12:26)
At the Last Supper Jesus explains that his death is for the forgiveness of our sins and to create a new covenant – a new relationship between us and God.
The Lord’s Supper
The Lord’s Supper or as it is often know, Holy Communion or the Eucharist or even the Mass, has been and is a key part of the life of the church. In verse 23 of our passage, Paul shows that it was one of the key things he introduced when he set up the church at Corinth, a way that he says was given by Christ.
At the start of the letter, Paul said that Christ crucified is the foundation of the church. The Lord’s Supper is the Christ given way to root the church in the foundation, to keep it focussed on its origins and purpose.
But, you may have noticed from the reading from Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth, that he was not happy with the way the Corinthians were carrying out the Lord’s Supper in their meetings. He says their meetings which were meant to involve the Lord’s supper were doing more harm than good!
Even more shocking, Paul adds a series of warnings in verses 27-30, that are quite worrying:
If you eat the bread and the wine in an unworthy manner, you sin against the body and blood of Christ.
If you don’t discern the body of Christ when you do so you will bring judgement on yourselves.
He even suggests that some of the illnesses and even deaths – that is what he means by ‘fallen asleep’ – are a result of carrying out the communion in this unworthy way.
The Lord’s Supper gone wrong
These are shocking warnings and many of the questions from our small groups this week arose around these. If we are to take these warnings seriously, then we need to ask ourselves,
In what ways can we eat and drink the bread and wine unworthily?
So, what did Paul mean when he warned about doing things in an unworthy manner. Looking at Paul’s letter, three possibilities suggest themselves:
- Unfaithful to Christ – 10:14-21
Firstly, Paul could be referring back to what he said in the previous chapter. There in a section where he warns people to flee from idolatry, he warns that you cannot both drink the cup of idols and the cup of the Lord.
The reason Paul brings communion into this, is because in a way the Lord’s Supper is the Christian parallel to the idol sacrifices in the pagan temples. The worship of the idols often involved sacrificing an animal to the god, then eating the cooked meat from this animal as part of a ritual meal. In this way, you identified with the idol god through in a sense sharing a meal with them.
For Christians, animal sacrifice is no longer needed, because Jesus’ death on the cross is the once for all sacrifice. The way we identify with Jesus and this sacrifice is not by making a new sacrifice, but by sharing in the Lord’s supper and remembering his sacrifice on the cross as we eat the bread and drink the wine.
Paul warns the Corinthians that you cannot do both. You cannot identify with idols in this way as well as with Christ. The God of the Old Testament and the New demands our faithfulness.
Indeed, the Old Testament often compared the worship of idols by the Israelites to an act of adultery. God is one and there are to be no gods beside him. Paul says, the same is true of Jesus. He demands exclusive loyalty. You cannot treat him as one god among many, just as a husband cannot treat his wife as one woman to sleep with among many.
So, to eat the bread and the wine is to express our loyalty to Christ. We cannot do that as well as being involved in idol worship. To do so would certainly be to eat and drink the bread in an unworthy manner, to reduce Jesus to one god among many.
This is an important teaching to grasp, but because Paul made this point in the previous chapter, it is probably not the main thing he is referring to in chapter 11.
- Uncaring of the Church – 11:17-22
Secondly, to eat in an unworthy manner, could be linked to what Paul says in the first part of the reading, where the problem is very much a lack of care for all members of the church.
It is not clear exactly what is happening at their meetings, but it seems some are enjoying their own lavish feasts, while others have nothing. Some get drunk, whilst others watch on hungry. The rich seem to live it up in a great party, whilst the poor are humiliated.
Perhaps the Corinthians are modelling their feasting on the feasts in the idol temples. Where perhaps there is a ‘High Table’ for the rich and important, and poor tables for everyone else. Or maybe, the wealthy just can’t bring themselves to share a meal with slaves.
This criticism of the Corinthians ties in with the the general thrust of these chapters, where Paul is stressing the importance of love in the Christian community, a love that values and builds up the other, no matter who they are, a love that is fundamentally modelled on the cross of Christ.
In behaving in ways that belittle and ignore others, the wealthy in the church were acting in contradiction to the example of the cross. They may have thought that they were celebrating the Lord’s Supper, but Paul says they had completely missed the point – their meetings were doing more harm than good.
This certainly, could then be the way in which the Corinthians were eating the bread in an unworthy manner. It may be that when Paul says they were failing to recognise or discern the body, the ‘body’ he is referring to is the church as the ‘body of Christ.’ Certainly, that is also suggested in chapter 10, where Paul says:
“Because there is one loaf, we who are many are one body,
for we all share in one bread.” (10:17)
These days I am not aware of churches where the Lord’s Supper is done in a way that humiliates the poor as was happening in Corinth. Yet, there are many today, who claim to be Christian, but don’t want to have anything to do with church or to meet with other believers.
My daughter, said she has a friend at university who says they’re a Christian, but hates the church. This attitude is a growing trend amongst all ages. Certainly, there are a lot of reasons to hate the church. There are numerous examples of abusive leaders and many have been in churches marked more by arguments, division and backbiting than the love of Christ. Churches are full of sinners. Although, we may long that all Christians become more Christ-like, we are all still a work in progress, far from the finished product!
Yet, Jesus did not die to save individuals, he died to create a community of saved individuals. He told us to remember his death in a shared meal, a meal that by necessity means coming together with others in community. In our increasingly individualised internet world, meeting in person with others in community on a regular basis is becoming rarer. But as Christians, if we believe in a cross that breaks down barriers and forms community, we need to live as though we buck that trend!
So, a failure to care for the wider church, may be what Paul means by eating the bread and wine in an unworthy manner and the body in verse 29 may refer to the church as the body of Christ. However, the more immediate context is the body of Christ as in his body given on the cross.
- Unconcerned about the Cross – 11:29
That leads to the third possibility of what it means to eat and drink in an unworthy manner. It may be a failure to be concerned for the cross as the fundamental and foundational saving act of God.
For the Corinthians, the Lord’s Supper seems to have become just something they did as a church, without much concern for how it was done or what it was about. They had lost the heart of its meaning. They failed to recognise that it was pointing to the sacrificial body of Christ given for them on the cross.
They had forgotten that it was only by Jesus’ death on the cross, that they could have the New Covenant relationship with God. It was only by God’s amazing grace in sending Jesus, that they could have forgiveness of sins and the hope of eternal life. The Lord’s Supper was meant to keep them rooted in these facts, but for them it had become about something else.
Fundamentally to eat the bread and drink the wine in an unworthy manner, is to do so without identifying yourself with the crucified Christ.
The other possibilities flow from this. If we are saved by Jesus’ ultimate act of love, in giving up everything for the sake of our salvation, then we need to live for the sake of our brothers and sisters in Christ, forgoing our rights for the sake of building them up and not tearing them down. To identify with the crucified Christ pushes us to care for the church, the family of other Christians around us.
And if we believe that we are saved only through Jesus’ death on the cross, then how can we treat him as one god among many. How can we in any way identify with other idols?
Why does Paul talk about judgement for doing so?
When we see that the Lord’s Supper plays an essential and formational part in the life of the church and it is about rooting us in the foundational moment of Christ’s death on the cross. Then we see that to carry it out in an unworthy way, may be to mock, ridicule or belittle the cross. Such behaviour surely demands God’s judgement?
But there is still God’s grace. Paul is not talking about God’s ultimate judgement here. Rather he calls it God’s discipline. Sometimes when things go wrong for us in life, perhaps we get ill or something else bad happens, God is using such things to shake us up and make us take him more seriously. That seems to be what was happening to the Corinthians because of their behaviour around the Lord’s Supper.
Not that every illness, death or bad thing in life is God saying to us we are getting something wrong. But sometimes God uses such things as a way of shaking us up and calling us back to him.
How should we prepare to receive the Lord’s Supper ‘worthily’?
So, how should we prepare to receive the Lord’s Supper ‘worthily’? Paul says we should examine ourselves. We need to ask ourself questions such as:
Do we look to the cross as God’s gracious act that brings us salvation or are we beginning to think that we can get to God by our own goodness, that we don’t need the cross. Is pride in our accomplishments replacing gratitude for the cross?
Do I seek to forego my rights to build up other Christians and the church community in love, as Christ gave up his rights and died on the cross to enable me to become one of his people?
Are there people in the church, that I need to offer reconciliation to as Christ offered me reconciliation through the cross?
Are there idols, that are competing for my loyalty to Christ, whose love and sacrifice demand my total love?
In short is my life and relationship with God shaped by Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross?
Does it matter how often we receive the Lord’s Supper?
The Lord’s Supper is an important part of what it means to be church. It regularly reconnects us with the cross as the foundation of our faith. But how often should we receive it?
In one sense this is a silly question. It is like my children asking, “How often should we visit you?” I would be upset if they never visited me or only rarely. But the actual number of times that are appropriate depend on all kinds of factors.
In the same way the Bible does not set a clear number of times we should take the bread and wine, but if we are serious about the faith, then we will want to do so relatively regularly. At St. George’s we offer it almost every week and at St. Luke’s once a month. Probably for most Christians, to aim to do so at least once a month is good, but everyone’s circumstances are different and we should not want to be legalistic about it.
What is more important is that we encourage people to take it as the Christ given means of rooting us in the cross as his once and for all saving act, that brings us into our life giving and saving relationship with God.
St. Luke's Church Ramsgate 