When ye come therefore together into one place, it is not to eat [the] Lord's supper.
The Corinthians met week by week to break bread, yet Paul tells them their gathering was not the Lord's supper at all. So what makes a meal His supper and not just a meal Christians share?
One commentator finds in this verse the reason the first Christians met at all:
The first day of the week the disciples met together to break bread. This was evidently their custom... Other things were done; they spoke, taught, as Paul did, sang; but they met together to break bread. This is confirmed by 1 Corinthians 11:20, where the apostle says that the Corinthians did not really assemble for the Lord's supper, since each ate his own supper, not thinking of the others, but eating and drinking for his own pleasure. Now this shows clearly that the object of the assembly was the Lord's supper.
The phrase "the Lord's supper" marks ownership:
We gather together to His name, and the Lord has affixed His name to His supper. It is the Lord's table, and it is the Lord's supper in a special way. The original expression is such that it shows the supper belongs peculiarly to Him. His name is upon it as being His own supper, just as the first of the week is distinguished as the Lord's day.
People once thought Christians invented the word behind "the Lord's." Later discoveries showed otherwise:
People once supposed that the word kuriakon (compare kuriake, used of the Lord's Day in Revelation 1:10) was coined for this purpose. But we now know that the word belonged to the everyday Greek of that period. It was used to mean "imperial," or "royal."
At Corinth the meeting had sunk to the level of an ordinary meal:
The text shows that the Corinthians clearly confused the Lord's Supper with an ordinary meal, or put it on the same level as one. Some came who were hungry and ate their fill. Others were thirsty and drank too much. The more prosperous among them showed their status all too clearly and ate more than the others. Moreover, it appears that each one came when it suited him... They failed to tell the difference between the Lord's Supper and a normal meal. Paul describes this as eating and drinking unworthily.
Paul's contrast is between the Lord's supper and "his own supper." The problem sat deeper than the food on the table:
The Corinthians came together, and the result was that they ate their own supper. They brought their own food and their wretched selves with them. "Self" was prominent in their minds the whole time they were together. And though they made the usual motions with their mouths, the hearts of many were far from the Lord.
The failure was not in where they sat, but in what they had forgotten:
Never forget this: you can be at the Lord's Table and still fail completely to take part in the Lord's Supper... Selfishness, and forgetting what the supper means, had thrown them into such disorder that they turned this solemn occasion into a feast. So what they ate was their own supper, not the Lord's Supper. They had cut the bread and wine off from almost all connection with the body and blood of Christ.
So what does it mean to eat the supper?
Though professing to do so, the Corinthians did not eat the Lord's supper. So we conclude that taking the Lord's supper does not mean simply eating the bread and drinking the wine. It means entering into the truth of all its deep meaning. It is not a question of doctrine, but of the affections. The simplicity of the description is most striking. The newest believer can easily understand it. Yet the oldest believer cannot reach the bottom of it.
The affections need an object, and He named it Himself:
When we come to the Supper, we do not come to a mere ceremony. We do not sit down to perform an empty ritual. We come to remember a Person. "Do this," He said, "in remembrance of ME." If at the cross the "YOU" filled His thoughts, at the Supper the "ME" must fill ours... the personal element eclipses all else.
- His purpose. The first disciples met to break bread. Speaking, teaching and singing happened around that centre.
- His name. The supper carries His name because it belongs to Him, just like the Lord's day, the first day of the week.
- His supper displaced. At Corinth each one ate his own supper; the meal turned ordinary, and self, not Christ, filled their minds.
- His verdict. A church can sit at the Lord's table and still hear that what it eats is not the Lord's supper.
- His person. Eating it is a matter of the affections, not of going through the act. Remembering Him gives the supper its character.
For each one in eating takes his *own* supper before [others], and one is hungry and another drinks to excess.
The Corinthians met to eat the Lord's Supper. Paul says that is not what they were eating at all. Each one took his own food first, and the gap between rich and poor showed at the table. How did a memorial of Christ's death sink this low? And what does it warn us about our own meetings?
Paul's rebuke turns on one small word: "own."
How very marked the distinction between "the Lord's supper" and "his own supper"! Does it not strike you, dear friend? The first holds the grand idea of the whole body. The second is a miserable, selfish individualism. We cannot eat "the Lord's supper" with spiritual understanding unless we hold in our hearts the blessed truth of the whole body and every precious member of it. In short, when we eat "the Lord's supper," we think of Christ and His beloved members. When we eat "our own supper," we are occupied with self and its interests.
The trouble started at a shared meal run on Greek social custom:
At these love-feasts they each brought their fare as at the festive shared meal (the eranos) of the Greeks. This was, in fact, a contribution-meal. What a descent from Christianity to pagan practice, when each would bring his own! So the rich came with plenty, and the poor had little or nothing to bring. When they came together for these feasts, selfishness marked them, not love. Those who had plenty soon proved how easy it is to have too much, and those who were poor felt it on these occasions.
The love-feast lay behind the disorder. One writer explains what it was, and where it led:
The love-feast was a meal the early Christians ate in common. Its aim was to build friendship among people who are strangers and pilgrims here, called to suffer on earth and to spend eternity together in glory with the Lord... The Corinthians, however, had lost that sense of being strangers here. So the principle of Christian fellowship was destroyed at the very meal that should have displayed it. And as they selfishly forgot why they came together, God gave them up to the deeper sin of degrading the Lord's supper, which they ate at the same time, through the effects of their licence in eating and drinking.
Commentators differ on how far the excess went. Some hold that the word means just what it says:
We consider the older Authorized Version's rendering of 1 Corinthians 11:21 quite correct. The word it translates "drunken" comes from the same root as the word rendered "do not get drunk" in Ephesians 5:18. That proves very clearly that the wine they used was intoxicating.
Others read it as excess falling just short of that:
Paul told them to "wait for one another." Each had been eating his own supper before his neighbour's came, making a picnic of it, as they pleased. I do not know that they became actually drunk, but some were what one calls carousing. It is all easily understood if you remember that they were taking a meal before the Supper.
The greed was only a symptom. Underneath lay a failure to discern the body of Christ. The same root can bear quieter fruit in us:
They failed to discern the body of Christ, and so each one thought only of himself... Here self was allowed to bear fruit so glaring and so monstrous that it shocks our natural feelings. But suppose I come to the meetings and sit there thinking only of the chapter I am to read, the hymn I am to give out, the part I am to take. Then self is the hinge on which my thoughts turn in spiritual things, just as much as if I had brought my own supper and eaten it, like the Corinthians in natural things, while my poor brother who could not afford one went away without.
Paul's remedy is practical: hunger belongs at home, and the assembly belongs to God.
But if they wanted to eat and drink independently of others in the assembly, could they not do this in their homes? They were despising the Church of God, and shaming others less privileged than themselves.
Paul does not stop at rebuke. He gives an order later in the chapter:
They made that sacred memorial so much a private thing that it became a scene of unfitting disorder, everyone eating for himself. So the apostle instructs in verse 33: "So then, my brothers... wait for one another."
- Self — The whole verse turns on one word: "own." Self took Christ's place at the centre, and the rest followed.
- Sink — Worldly class lines took over a common meal, and the holiest feast on earth went down with it.
- Split — Forget the body, and believers eat side by side yet apart: one hungry, one full, none in fellowship.
- Scandal — Shaming the poor at that table was not just bad manners; it was despising the church of God itself.
- Solution — "Wait for one another." Eat at home if you are hungry; come to the Supper for Christ and for each other.
Have ye not then houses for eating and drinking? or do ye despise the assembly of God, and put to shame them who have not? What shall I say to you? shall I praise you? In this [point] I do not praise.
Paul has just described the Corinthians' gatherings: private meals, some going hungry while others drank too much. Now he asks four blunt questions, and each one names a different wrong — misuse of the meeting, contempt for God's assembly, shame heaped on the poor, and praise he cannot give.
The trouble grew out of a shared meal held alongside the breaking of bread. One writer traces the collapse to class distinctions taking over that meal.
The love-feast was a meal the early Christians shared in common. Its aim was to build social fellowship among people who are strangers and pilgrims here, called to suffer on earth and to spend eternity together in glory with the Lord. But the Corinthians had lost the sense that Christians are strangers here. They had let in from the world the rivalry of the schools over favourite teachers. In the same way they degraded even the love-feast by holding to class distinctions. The rich feasted on their own contributions to the meal, and made those who had nothing to give feel their poverty keenly.
The first question is not a ban on eating. It sends ordinary hunger home, because something else was happening where they met.
The supper was a memorial of Him in His death, but it was a memorial of Him, the living One. It sent their hearts back to Calvary, but He was present; this was the point. They had houses to eat and drink in. If the question was satisfying hunger and thirst, let them eat their food at home. But at the Supper the Lord was there, while His death and the manner of His death filled their hearts.
Paul does not say they despised each other. He says they despised the church of God — and that possessive is the hinge of the whole charge.
These thoughtless rioters had done a double wrong. They had despised not only God, but His Church... They had gathered, but where was the Lord? It is a solemn thing to come together in that Name. An assembly of Christian worshippers is not simply a voluntary association. To the eye it is made up of people, but it takes its name and true character from God, who is always in the middle of His gathered people... To behave badly in His congregation is to insult Him in His house... His house would have fed them well. But while that spirit ruled, the gathering was their own, not His.
The second half of the question ties back to the first. Shaming the poor is not a separate failure from despising the assembly, because of who belongs to it.
Apart from these excesses, the assembly was no place for social feasting. "Do you not have houses to eat and drink in?" asks the Apostle. Or were they putting the poor to shame and despising the assembly of God, which holds rich and poor together?... They brought the social element into the assembly, and it led to social distinctions and self-indulgence. So their coming together denied in practice both the Lord's Supper and the assembly of God.
Paul asks what he should say, then answers himself. Refusing praise goes against his own wish for them.
They were a spectacle of greed. What made it more blatant: those who had money were the worse offenders, despising the church of God and putting the poor to shame. With all his desire to praise the Corinthians, in this the apostle could not.
The Corinthian scene is crude enough to feel remote. One writer finds the same root in a far more respectable form.
The moral root of the disorder was this: they failed to discern the body of Christ, and so each was occupied with himself... Here they let self produce fruit so glaring and so monstrous that it shocks our natural feelings. But suppose I come to the meetings and sit there, thinking only of the chapter I am to read, the hymn I am to give out, the part I am to take. Then self is just as much the hinge on which my thoughts and worries turn in spiritual things. It would be no different in natural things if, like the Corinthians, I brought my own supper and ate it, while my poor brother who could not afford this went away without.
- Self is the root. Each took his own supper first. Failing to discern the body of Christ leaves everyone busy with himself.
- Self despises. Bad manners here are contempt for God. The assembly takes its name and character from Him, and He is present in the middle of it.
- Self shames. The assembly holds rich and poor together. Class distinctions at the table humiliate the people it embraces.
- Self empties the Supper. Their gathering denied in practice both the Lord's Supper and the assembly of God. The form stayed; the reality was gone.
- Self forfeits praise. Paul wanted to commend them and could not. Ordinary hunger belongs at home. Where the Lord is present, His death fills the heart.