In each of his letters, Paul is addressing a specific community; in this one it is the church in Corinth, there is also the church in Colossus, the one in Ephesus, the one in Thessalonica, and others. The letters are responsive to an issue, or various issues, within that specific church. The problem is we don’t get the information or letter he received from the community, we only have his response to what was shared. So, in order to understand Paul’s letter, we can’t read it straight off the page as strict directions to us, it wasn’t addressed directly to us. Instead, we have to understand the context it was written for. In this case, we need to learn a little about the church in Corinth.
The church in Corinth is divided…we see they struggle with division on various issues throughout the 2 letters. What we know here is that in Greece,
· people were divided by class and social status.
· People were treated differently based on their status
o We have flickers of that now, but social status isn’t always obvious to us. So if someone isn’t in a known role, we may have no concept of what their economic status is.
· But in Greece, status was known, it had to be known, because it dictated social etiquette.
· That was Greek culture and it filtered down into Christian culture and became apparent even during communion.
· Those distinctions would have been held at meal times too—that’s what we see here.
o Upper class people would have been fed more food and wine and better quality food.
o Lower class people would have been offered less food and lower quality food.
o This became so profound in the Corinthian church that as Paul says here—some left drunk and others left hungry. The rich were encouraged to feast and gorge themselves, to the point of being drunk, where the poor were offered so little that they left hungry.
o That was a gross distinction.
· Now, Paul couldn’t change all of Greek culture, but he could change what the church was doing. Just because the culture created a distinction did not mean the church had to uphold it.
And while eating at home to not embarrass others during communion is hardly our issue when we take but a morsel of bread, treating each other with love and equality and without social distinction is still very relevant for us. Now, that’s just part of the caution to us when we take communion--to remember that as children of God we are equal—that regardless of the distinctions our world makes between us, God does not make those same distinctions.
The other part of Paul’s caution deals with self-examination—part of that is related to the first issue in that no one should believe him or herself higher than another and if we do we need to do some serious self examination before we take communion. We should take communion and be humbled by what Christ has done, not haughty and proud of our own accomplishments.
The second part of the caution deals with acknowledging what communion actually signifies. We don’t have to understand it fully—I’m not even sure we can understand all of it—in many ways parts of communion will forever be a mystery, but we do need to acknowledge that this isn’t just bread and juice—it is something set apart, something sacred. And it’s sacred because of Christ and his sacrifice and suffering.
Taking communion should give us pause, we should take time to think about and reflect on what it really means. Now, we shouldn’t be overly cautious… not in the sense of not taking because we are afraid to screw it up. Afterall, this is a gift offered to us as sinners…we won’t ever be perfect before we take communion. It is communion that perfects us.
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