Today’s reading: Jeremiah 52; 1 Corinthians 11
Does anybody know when communion moved from being a large (and evidently not quiet/solemn) meal shared together to being a quiet, primarily personal thing with a small bit of bread and wine?
I’m going to try to find some time to dig into this a bit later and will update this post if I find anything, but this is something I’ve been thinking about more and more lately. When Jesus, at the last supper, told His disciples that, as often as they ate the bread and drank the wine, they should do it in memory of Him, it was in the context of a meal together. It has always made me wonder whether He was calling them to a specific new thing where they just eat a small bit of bread and drink a small bit of wine, specifically to remember Him, or if it’s more like the rainbow at the end of the Flood story where God tells Noah that when he sees a rainbow in the clouds, let it be a reminder that He will never again flood the earth to extinguish all life, and really Jesus is saying, “You know this thing that you do all the time? Eating bread and drinking wine? Yeah, let this mundane, common thing be a constant reminder to you of what I have done for you. Rejoice daily, multiple times a day, as often as you eat and drink, in the grace that is poured out on you through the cross.”
Clearly, in the Corinthian church at least, their understanding of sharing in communion looked little like what it is in most churches today. Paul rebukes them for their lack of care and concern for one another in their celebration of communion, where each person goes ahead with his own meal, one going hungry while another gets drunk. When Paul says, “if anyone is hungry, let him eat at home,” in the context of them having a meal together, he’s not telling them to stop having a full meal together, but that if you are showing up so hungry that you are taking what should belong to others, eating more than your share, then eat at home before you come so that you aren’t going beyond what is reasonable to the detriment of others sharing in the meal as well. The way I think of that instruction is in terms of pizza at the youth group my wife and I help with. We will regularly get pizza for the students, normally enough for a couple pieces per student, but every once in a while one student will try to take an entire pizza (or more) for themself because they’re hungry and haven’t eaten dinner yet. They may be hungry, but we got the pizza for everyone to share, not to fill that one student up while others sit and watch with nothing to eat. But telling them to eat dinner at home before they come is not saying we can’t enjoy pizza together, just that they don’t get to gorge themselves on it while others go hungry.
That said, it seems pretty clear from this passage that at least some of the celebration of communion, in the Corinthian church (carried out at Paul’s instruction), was as part of a broader meal. I don’t know that we could say from this passage whether this was their entire understanding of communion, or whether they considered every meal in this context as well, but were intentionally sharing in a regular meal together, but it’s clear that communion, as far as they were concerned, looked very different than how most churches tend to celebrate it today.
Like I said at the beginning of this post, this is something I’ve wondered about for years (though clearly it has never bothered me enough to do the research on it), so I would love to hear anyone else’s thoughts on it, or if anyone knows when/why it morphed from being part of a shared meal to being what it is today.
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