The key is love
When you meet together as a group, it is not the Lord’s Supper that you eat. For as you eat, you each go ahead with your own meal, so that some are hungry while others get drunk. Don’t you have your own homes in which to eat and drink? Or would you rather despise the church of God and put to shame the people who are in need? What do you expect me to say to you about this? Shall I praise you? Of course I don’t! (verses 20-22)
Paul is appalled by the lovelessness and self-centredness some of the Corinthian congregation have been showing. There are people who are wealthy, others who are poor. Rather than share what they have, some of the wealthy are beginning before all have arrived and are leaving little for others to eat. Therefore some are standing before the Lord’s table more than satiated while others stand there hungry.
This whole passage is about order and decorum. Christians were on show in Corinth; they were watched carefully by pagans curious to know what made members of this strange new religion tick. The last thing Paul wanted the Corinthian pagans to be able to say was, ‘Look, these people are just like us!’
We too are on show in our society. People want to see if we Christians practise what we preach or whether the old accusation is true, ‘The church is full of hypocrites’. While we are very much to be in the society God has placed us in, we are not to be like it. Rather, we would hope that people watching us would be moved to say – as they did of much of the early church, ‘See how these Christians love each other!’
Father, may my worship of you, and the way I treat my fellow Christians, always be pleasing to you. Amen.
by Bob Turnbull, in ‘New Strength for each Day’ (LCA, Openbook, 1998)
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