Guest Post by Christopher Dather
A few months ago, our
organic church group celebrated its first Lord's Supper. Think less a
wafer and a shot of grape juice, and more a "love feast."
Everyone pitched in and
served everyone else. The meal was homemade- nothing processed.
Everybody helped make the bread- even the children. We did
everything but stomp the grapes.
We fellowshipped while
we prepared the feast. We shared thoughts, songs and passages of
Scripture during the meal as the Lord led, and we carried that communal time
into the post-meal cleanup. In short, this experience revolutionized the
word "fellowship" for me.
This experience also
brought an entirely new meaning- a deeper meaning- to Paul's rebuke of the
Corinthian believers in 1 Corinthians 11:17-34.
Under-Interpreting 1
Corinthians 11
Some Christians in the
contemporary church today fail to grasp the deeper meaning of 1 Corinthians 11.
We don't necessarily misinterpret, but we probably under-interpret
the immensity of the problem. It wasn't until I began to experience
organic church life that I was able to grasp the depth of the offense Paul was
seeking to correct in the Corinthian church.
Many of us cannot fathom
what a 1st century Lord's Supper may have looked like. I couldn't.
Until recently, I never knew the Lord's Supper as a full meal. All I knew
was a Styrofoam wafer with a factory-stamped cross on it, and a shot glass of
grape juice, served on a golden tray that passed by me as I sat quietly in my
pew. Somber music played in the background while I waited for everyone else to
get their Communion elements before we "feasted" on the Lord "in
our hearts."
This scene is a far cry
from the Communion of Paul’s day. The 1st century Christians knew
Communion as the Lord's Supper, a love feast- an entire meal
shared between disciples who gathered to fellowship with one another and
remember the Lord who sacrificed Himself for them on the cross. And now
that I've experienced natural, God-led fellowship in the context of a full-fledged
communion meal, Paul's rebuke of the Corinthian believers becomes more pointed
and heartbreaking than ever.
Re-examining 1
Corinthians 11:17-34
In 1 Corinthians
11:17-34 Paul told the believers in Corinth that he could not praise them for
the way they acted when they gathered together to break bread. Why not?
The Corinthians who
gathered to celebrate the love feast honored neither God nor neighbor by their
actions. When they gathered, some believers gorged themselves while
others went hungry. As Paul wrote,
"...When you come together, it is not the Lord's Supper that
you eat, for when you are eating, some of you go ahead with your own private
suppers. As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets
drunk" (11:20b-21).
His most incriminating
rebuke comes in v. 22: "Don't you
have homes to eat and drink in? Or
do you despise the church of God by humiliating those who have nothing?"
He even goes on to say
that those who are guilty of acting in this way are "guilty of sinning
against the body and blood of the Lord" (11:27).
Ouch! That's a
weighty accusation to throw out against a church. But honestly, I
couldn't completely understand why. I never got it because I always
assumed it was about the communion elements themselves. While, yes,
that's obviously important, that also misses a huge detail. It was never
only about the food. It was also about the people; the people who missed out
on the fellowship; the people who didn't connect with other believers; the
people who were shortchanged of the opportunity to both serve others and be
served by them.
I'm also floored by the
way the offending believers acted toward the poorer disciples at these love
feasts. I simply cannot imagine someone showing up to our supper and me
telling them, "I'm sorry, brother, but we went ahead without you. We
feasted- and it was good! We fellowshipped and really connected in such a
powerful way that only God could have done that! Sorry you didn't
get here sooner. We don't really have much left, but maybe I could whip
you up a bologna sandwich...." The poorer believers were left with
not only mere physical crumbs of food, but also spiritual crumbs of fellowship.
Do you see how
spiritually criminal this was? They gathered together to celebrate the
Lord's Supper, but they obviously forgot to bring God with them!
Expecting God to be okay with the way these believers were acting was no
different than the wayward Israelites offering sacrifices while trampling mercy
and love underfoot.
The believers at Corinth
failed to realize the truth that James so beautifully captured when he wrote:
"Faith by itself, if it is not
accompanied by action, is dead" (Jam. 2:17).
If our faith is not a
tangible faith, then what good is it?
From Ritual to
Relationships: A Paradigm Shift
What tripped me up when
I used to approach this passage was that I looked at the situation in terms of
the sacrament, but failed to truly grasp what was going on. I failed to
understand that Paul warned the believers to check their hearts before taking
part in the Lord's Supper, (not because we have to be paranoid about any
lurking unresolved sins and confess them lest we invite the punishment of the
Almighty), but rather because communion had become something less than it was
intended for the Corinthian believers. It had devolved into something
somewhere between a rote ritual devoid of its true meaning and an outright
excuse for the wealthier believers to get together and feast without restraint.
So, where's the
application here? Actually, I have two application points. First,
we have to be so very careful when we approach the text of the Bible. It’s easy
to read what we think it says rather than what it actually says. This is a
Hermeneutics 101 lesson- check your biases at the door. It's easy to slip
up, anyone can do it.
The second point plays
off of the first: faulty interpretation can lead to misguided application. I
misinterpreted this passage and only saw the ritual, but Paul was speaking just
as much about the people who were being overlooked as He was about the supper
itself. I saw communion elements, he saw the poor being neglected.
I saw ritual, he saw relationships.
Our new life in Christ
was never supposed to be primarily about lifeless religion- the world has
enough of that. It's supposed to be about a living, breathing, vibrant
relationship with the Lord that is expressed in the context of relationships
with others.
The world needs to see
authenticity like this – true disciples filled with the love of Jesus and
living missionally.
You were reborn for
more. Don't settle for anything less.
**
(Scripture quotations
taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version NIV
Copyright 1973, 1978,
1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.)
