When I was growing up, I understood the Lord’s Supper as a very private and individual event. The preacher would say a few words from the front, give some directions, and then command each of us to examine ourselves, based on 1 Corinthians 11:27-28. We needed to examine ourselves to see if there was any sin in our life in the past week that was unconfessed, because if there was  we would be eating “in an unworthy manner” or “unworthily”, which was punishable by a strong penalty, as seen in verse 30. The unworthiness was not so much the way we took the Lord’s Supper, it was whether we ourselves were unworthy to partake. As least, this is what I thought until recently when I preached on 1 Corinthians 11:17-34.

What I found was somewhat different from what I had seen there before. In this section of Corinthians, Paul is answering the questions of the Corinthians and rebuking them for specific problems he has heard about, and this section is one of the latter. Paul was not simply teaching about the Lord’s Supper when he gave the section about the Lord’s Supper, he was correcting the bad behavior of the Corinthians at the Lord’s Supper. The rich were apparently being selfish, and using the meal to show off their wealth and power at the expense of the poor in the church. To counter this sin, Paul gives the Lord’s Supper pericope to show them that the meal was in remembrance of the great sacrifice that Christ made when he came to earth and died for humans. In parallel to this example, the Christians celebrating the Lord’s Supper should sacrifice for each other and seek to encourage each other, just as Christ sacrificed for the church. The Corinthians were contradicting with their actions the very essence of the Lord’s supper.

This means that the command to not partake in an unworthy manner was not so much about whether we have unconfessed sin in our life as was whether the people were at the meal to show off their wealth or to encourage each other. The unworthiness was in the manner of celebrating the Lord’s Supper, not in themselves. (Just on a side note, Garlandhas a provocative thought in his commentary about the people falling asleep. He says that perhaps they were falling asleep not because they were being punished but because they were starving, due to famine and lack of help from the others in the church. I don’t know if he is right, but it is very interesting.)

So how does this text teach us about the Lord’s Supper? I would say that examining our lives to see if we have unconfessed sin in our lives is a good activity and one that should be done often, not just as the Lord’s Supper. But I do not think that this is specifically what Paul was thinking about when he wrote this passage. Paul was countering an anti-communal, pro-self attitude in the Corinthian church. If Paul saw our Lord Supper’s, what would he say about them? We may not have the rich eating all the food before the poor arrive, but have we exemplified the communal love that Paul was commanding the Corinthians to show? It seems to me we have avoided the negative (oppressing each other in the Lord’s Supper), but we have also not done the positive (encourage each other at the Lord’s Supper). But I am not sure how to go about rectifying the problem. How can we as modern evangelicals make the Lord’s Supper more communal, as I think Paul would want it to be?