Scripture Daily

Context No. 3751 of 4322 · 1 Corinthians

Context · Reflection

1 Corinthians 11:17-22: in context

17But in giving you this command I don’t praise you, because you come together not for the better but for the worse. 18For first of all, when you come together in the assembly, I hear that divisions exist among you, and I partly believe it. 19For there also must be factions among you, that those who are approved may be revealed among you. 20When therefore you assemble yourselves together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat. 21For in your eating each one takes his own supper first. One is hungry, and another is drunken. 22What, don’t you have houses to eat and to drink in? Or do you despise God’s assembly and put them to shame who don’t have enough? What shall I tell you? Shall I praise you? In this I don’t praise you.

Paul rebukes the Corinthians for a shameful practice at their gatherings. When they come together for what should be the Lord's Supper, a meal of unity in Christ, the wealthy eat their fill and even get drunk while the poor go hungry, exposing deep divisions in the body. Their coming together, Paul says, does more harm than good.

What was meant to embody their oneness in Christ had become a display of the very social divisions the gospel overturns. The rich humiliated the poor at the table where all are meant to be equal before God. There is a searching challenge here for how we treat one another in the church. The Lord's table is a place of unity, where distinctions of wealth and status are supposed to fall away before the one Lord who died for all. To let worldly divisions of rich and poor, of insider and outsider, mark our life together is to despise the church of God and to miss the meaning of the meal.

Do I let the unity of Christ's people shape how I treat others in the church, refusing to carry worldly divisions of status and wealth into the family where all are one in him?

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