Sickness at the Lord’s Supper

Few passages in the New Testament are as unsettling as the end of 1 Corinthians 11. Paul tells a church that some of its members are weak, some are sick, and some have died, and he ties all of it to the way they ate the Lord’s supper.

The usual explanation is a gentle one. The Corinthians were careless and rude, Paul was displeased with their manners, and the sickness was a stern warning against treating a sacred meal lightly. We are told that it has nothing to do with the purity laws of the Torah, since those were left behind.

Part of that is true, for they did treat the meal lightly. But it leaves a question unanswered: why would carelessness at a meal lead to sickness and death? Rudeness does not usually put people in the grave. Paul did not invent a new penalty for a new ritual. The explanation had already been written, and it is older than Corinth by more than a thousand years.

A Table Compared to an Altar

In Chapter 22 we saw that Paul set the Lord’s table beside the altar in Jerusalem: “are not those who eat the sacrifices sharers in the altar?” (1 Corinthians 10:18). The altar had a rule. Whoever ate a holy offering “with his uncleanness upon him” was cut off (Leviticus 7:20; 22:3).

Long before Paul, Israel had already seen what happens when a crowd comes to a holy meal without being made ready for it. In the days of King Hezekiah, the nation gathered in Jerusalem to keep the Passover:

2 Chronicles 30:18-20 For a multitude of the people, many from Ephraim and Manasseh, Issachar and Zebulun, had not cleansed themselves, yet they ate the Passover not as it is written; for Hezekiah prayed for them, saying: "May the good LORD make atonement on behalf of everyone who has prepared his heart to seek God, the LORD, the God of his fathers, though not according to the purity of the holy place." And the LORD listened to Hezekiah, and healed the people.

The last line deserves a slow reading: “And the LORD listened to Hezekiah, and healed the people.” The Chronicler does not describe the illness, and he has no need to, because healing assumes that something needed to be healed. The people who ate the Passover “not as it is written,” “not according to the purity of the holy place,” stood in need of it. Their hearts were sincere, and Hezekiah’s prayer leaned on that sincerity. Even so, coming near the holy in an unfit state was not harmless.

Hold that scene in mind, and then step into a house church in Corinth.

What Was Happening in Corinth

1 Corinthians 11:20-21 Therefore when you meet together, it is not to eat the Lord's Supper, for in your eating each one takes his own supper first; and one is hungry and another is drunk.

“Each one takes his own supper first; and one is hungry and another is drunk.” Each person went ahead with his own food, so that one left the table hungry and another left it drunk. This was no holy meal. It was a private dinner party with the Lord’s name written on the door.

1 Corinthians 11:27 Therefore whoever eats this bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner, shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord.

“In an unworthy manner” is a single Greek word, anaxios ἀναξίως an-ax-ee'-oce, and it describes the manner of the eating and drinking, not the amount. Paul is not concerned that someone took too large a piece of bread. He is concerned with the manner in which they came to the table.

1 Corinthians 11:29-32 For the one who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner, eats and drinks krima κρίμα kree'-mah(verdict) to himself if he does not diakrino διακρίνω dee-ak-ree'-no(active: discern) the body of the Lord. For this reason many among you are weak and sick, and a number sleep. But if we diakrino(active: discerned) ourselves, we would not be krino κρίνω kree'-no(judged). But when we are krino(judged), we are disciplined by the Lord so that we will not be katakrino κατακρίνω kat-ak-ree'-no(condemned) along with the world.

The whole passage turns on one verb. Diakrino (διακρίνω) means to separate, to make a distinction, to tell one thing from another. Paul’s charge is that they did not distinguish the Lord’s table from an ordinary meal. They treated the holy as common.

We have met that idea before. It is the priest’s standing order in Leviticus 10:10, “to make a distinction between the holy and the common.” The word Paul uses for what the Corinthians failed to do names the very thing the Torah commanded.

Why Leviticus 10 Begins Where It Does

That verse stands in a context, and the context makes Paul’s warning heavier still. Leviticus 10 opens with death in Aaron’s house:

Leviticus 10:1-2 And the sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, took each man (ish אִישׁ eesh) his censer, and put fire in them, and laid incense on it, and brought near before the LORD strange fire, which he had not commanded (tzivvah צָוָה tsaw-vaw') them. And fire came out from before the LORD, and devoured them, and they died before the LORD.

When the LORD next speaks to Aaron in that chapter, these are His words:

Leviticus 10:9-10 "Wine and strong drink you shall not drink, you and your sons with you, when you go into the tent (ohel אֹהֶל o'-hel) of appointed time (moed מוֹעֵד mo-ade'), that you do not die; it is a statute (chuqqah חֻקָּה khook-kaw') forever throughout your generations; and to make a distinction between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean;

These words bear directly on Corinth. “Wine and strong drink you shall not drink … when you go into the tent (ohel) of appointed time (moed), that you do not die.” And in the same breath comes the charge “to make a distinction between the holy and the common.”

Two priests have just died before the LORD, and the first command the LORD then gives to Aaron concerns wine. A priest who has been drinking does not go into the tent of meeting. The LORD made it a statute “forever throughout your generations”: no wine for those who serve before Him, so that they do not die.

Now set Corinth beside it. What were the Corinthians doing at the Lord’s table? They were drinking until they were drunk. People whom Paul calls the sanctuary of God were eating at a table he compares to the altar, drunk and unable to tell the holy meal from a common one, and some of them were dying.

Paul is not being unusually harsh. What he says to Corinth follows the line Leviticus 10 had already drawn.

A Current That Must Be Handled Rightly

Think again of the live wire from Chapter 22, and picture the same current running through the wiring of a house. Handled rightly, it lights the rooms and warms the food and serves the whole family. Treated carelessly, as though a live wire were an ordinary cord, it does not merely fail to help. It can injure or kill the one who touches it and anyone close by. The fault does not lie in the current, which is doing what it always does. The fault lies in failing to tell a live wire from a dead one.

The Torah speaks of holy things in that way, again and again:

Leviticus 22:9 And they shall keep my charge (mishmeret מִשׁמֶרֶת mish-meh'-reth), lest they bear sin for it and die by it, because they profane it: I am the LORD who sanctifies them.

Numbers 18:32 And you shall bear no sin over it, when you offer up its best from it; and the holy things of the sons of Israel you shall not profane, that you do not die."

“Lest they bear sin for it and die by it, because they profane it.” “The holy things of the sons of Israel you shall not profane, that you do not die.” To profane is to make the holy common, and each time the outcome named is death.

Set that beside Paul’s words, “many among you are weak and sick, and a number sleep,” and the two agree. Paul states his purpose in verse 32. The judgment is discipline, “so that we will not be katakrino(condemned) along with the world.” Yet that discipline follows lines the Torah had drawn long before.

The Temple and the Table Together

In the same letter Paul calls the Corinthian believers the naos ναός nah-os', the inner sanctuary of God (1 Corinthians 3:16-17, which we read in Chapter 5). In a sanctuary the table is holy, and so Paul guards who may sit at it:

1 Corinthians 5:11 But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is sexually immoral or greedy or an idolater or a reviler or a drunkard or a swindler — not even to eat with such a person.

“Not even to eat with such a person,” he writes, and a drunkard is on the list. In a community that is a sanctuary, the meal is not a neutral thing. Who eats, and how he eats, both matter.

Was the sickness in Corinth, then, only a warning about manners? Treating the supper lightly was indeed the problem. But the reason it led to sickness and death is not a rule the New Testament invented. It is Leviticus 7, 10 and 22, the same holiness that moved Hezekiah to pray for atonement for the people, still in force at a table in Corinth.

If the Torah’s boundaries still stood around the holy, a harder question follows. What of the boundary the early church argued over in Acts 15?