The Posit

So then, when you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper 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. Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God by humiliating those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you? Certainly not in this matter!

For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.”

1 Corinthians 11:20-24

This passage is the basis for the church ritual, the Lord’s Supper. It comes from one of the earliest New Testament scriptures, this letter addressed to non-Jewish believers in Greece.

First, let’s dispense with the misconception that this was a common meal. Paul clearly criticizes those that sought to make it one by saying they should meet their nutritional needs at home^[1]. If the chief criticism were how this humiliated those that had no food to eat, he would have instead urged those that had food share out of their abundance.

Not to imagine this means he did not expect brothers and sisters in the Lord to share. This description of a church, one of the first, shows one that is not homogenous but broadly spanning social classes and groups. For any group to ignore the concerns of another, particularly to the point of humiliation or belittlement, is, according to Paul, to despise the Body of Christ.

Obviously, this concern extends beyond menu choices to “the embarrassment of riches” in general. As one of the collected sayings of James make clear, we are obligated to our spiritual family beyond thoughts and prayers^[2]. Believers voluntarily holding all things in common was an initial resolution of this tension. Other resolutions may exist, but simply shrugging off the difference is condemned.

And since we’re here, let’s note how people got drunk celebrating the Lord’s Supper. Paul elsewhere condemns drunkenness, and here his main point is that this is a ritual and not an ordinary meal, but nowhere is alcohol forbidden. The truth is, the Celebration in many churches today has lost scriptural fidelity in a century-old fit of temperance.

So we arrive at a most interesting part: Paul claims that he taught this practice as received “from the Lord.” Many now with prejudice against direct interaction with the Holy Spirit will insert a parenthesis here: “indirectly through the Disciples who told Ananias who taught Paul.” But this flies in the face of the lack of such a prejudice with Paul (or Christ for that matter), who often claimed to experience just such interactions. In fact, in this same letter, he later advocates church prophecy^[3]. Finally, in this and following letters to the Corinthian church, he is at pains to establish his authority as an apostle that didn’t personally encounter Christ until in a vision after Christ’s resurrection. Presumably, he got instruction for the Lord’s Supper – if direct, as he claims here – in much the same way.

Indeed, when we look back at the gospels, the only possible positive evidence for Christ instituting the Lord’s Supper ritual is Luke’s addition for the bread, “in memory of me,” precisely Paul’s wording here. It bears remembering at this point that Luke, who sometimes worked with Paul, later published the last version of the three Synoptics (not one of which existed in written form when 1 Corinthians was written). In any case, the evidence is not strong.

But then what was so remarkable about Jesus’ behavior at the last dinner before his crucifixion that his Disciples did record it? Recall that he and his Disciples were celebrating Passover, a ritual meal with ancient and mysterious traditions.

One of these is to break a piece of unleavened bread and sandwich it between two whole pieces. It’s not much of a leap to think that it was this piece that Jesus broke and equated to his body the night before his was broken on the cross. Messianic interpreters go further and identify the other two, unbroken pieces as representing the other, unbroken parts of the Trinity.^[4]

The tradition of the wine is to drink from only four of five cups. The final one is reserved for the Prophet to come: “representing future redemption, it is left unconsumed.”^[5] Again, not hard to believe that this is the one Christ seized and bid his Disciples drink. Redemption was upon them, paid in divine blood the following day.

Christ at the Last Supper claimed to fulfill Passover and basically reinstituted it “in memory of me.” Jesus was saying the blood on the doorposts that Passover celebrates was his, foretold. Moreover, Jesus was claiming to be the One to Come and (though the Disciples certainly didn’t understand it then) oneness with God. If there was any ritual imparted then, it was a modified Passover, but even if not, the Disciples would certainly have found the meal memorable.

Which brings us back to Paul. Why would God tell him to institute the Lord’s Supper, particularly if Jesus had already modified Passover?

Here we remember Paul’s calling – to fulfill Christ’s call to establish his church among the non-Jews. The original disciples neglected the project, despite repeated supernatural urgings^[6], and had started to justify their neglect. Paul, on the other hand, was as ardent in this mission as he had been in his previous one to wipe out the Church altogether. Most of his letters detail the vision of a new branch and the ferocity with which he defended its separation from the covenant and the observances of the Jews.^[7] Not particularly surprising, then, that he was the one to act upon hearing prophetically the wholly original structures of a new and better covenant, one for all people. And in so doing, to forestall the adoption of even a modified Passover and other Judaization of the nascent Church that Paul elsewhere condemns.

I think, unlike the Corinthians that Paul was correcting in this letter, most Christians since understand that the Lord’s Supper is a divine ritual, but the broader problem is a sort of familiarity that leads some to forget those Passover claims Christ was making. So I also see a danger in the far side of the ritual – just viewing it as no more than a sort of magical observance that gets one into Heaven. These, too, Paul asks to examine their grounding – do we still realize the cost that was paid for our redemption? – as often as we eat of that broken Bread and drink from that time-soured, blood-red Cup. When we get up from that table again, it should be with the full impression of the reckoning Christ paid, in renewal of humility and happy urgency of the debt of our message to the world.

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^[1] 1 Corinthians 11:34

^[2] James 2:16

^[3] 1 Corinthians 14:9

^[4] https://www.songforisrael.org/news/indexphp/2015/4/the-symbolism-of-the-passover-afikomen-points-to-messiah

^[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/what-wine-means-at-passover-and-easter/2012/04/02/gIQAJd6NtS_story.html

^[6] Acts 11:1-18

^[7] Galatians 2:11