- During the Vietnam War, several hundred American officers and enlisted men were held captive for years and brutally treated in a prison camp dubbed the “Hanoi Hilton.” Imagine that the commander of the American armed forces secured the release of those prisoners by substituting himself for them and was then immediately tortured to death. Imagine further that those freed soldiers, those former POWs, came together for a meal in honor of that commander and that the officers pulled rank on that occasion, insisted on eating first and leaving the enlisted men to eat the leftovers. Wouldn’t maintaining rank at a meal in honor of one who died for all of them be absurd, be contrary to the spirit of the commander’s sacrifice? Certainly it would.
- Well, something similar to that was going on in Corinth during the observance of the Lord’s Supper, which is why Paul rebuked them so sternly in 1 Cor. 11:17-34.
- The Corinthians, along with other first century Christians, sometimes (or often) observed the Lord’s Supper in conjunction with a larger fellowship meal. This is the “love feast” mentioned in Jude 12 and probably alluded to in 2 Pet. 2:13. The Supper proper, the symbolic bread and fruit of the vine, probably was shared at the end of that meal.
- As the church in Corinth assembled to remember in the Lord’s Supper the sacrifice of Christ that saved them all, they were maintaining social rankings. Christians of higher social status, who no doubt supplied most of the food for the fellowship meal, were taking a disproportionate share of it; they were eating their “own supper” as Paul puts it in v. 21. They had more than enough, as indicated by the excess of wine some of them consumed, but the others were left hungry and were humiliated in the process by being treated as second class (v. 22).
- The fact they maintained social divisions in their gathering meant that they had missed an essential aspect of the Lord’s Supper. The Lord’s Supper simply cannot be eaten in a segregated, class-conscious assembly. That is why Paul says in v. 20, “It is not the Lord’s Supper that you eat.” Such social stratification denies the very oneness that the Supper symbolizes, the oneness Paul mentions in 1 Cor. 10:17.
- Our fellowship in Christ transcends all social, cultural, national, and racial differences. As Christians, we all are first and foremost sinners washed in the blood of Christ; that is our primary identity. We are one in him, “blood brothers and sisters,” regardless of where we come from, what we look like, or our position in society.
- Maintaining those divisions when gathering for the Supper, as was happening at Corinth, contradicts that truth. It represents a failure to “discern the body,” the phrase Paul uses in v. 29, meaning it represents a failure to recognize the oneness of the body of Christ, the church, by acting contrary to that oneness.
- As we participate this morning with joyful gratitude and adoration in this divinely prescribed honoring of the Lord, may we be truly mindful of our oneness in his blood.
Ashby Camp