NOTES for Co1 11:17-34

For Paul, as for all Christians, the breaking of bread and the gatherings connected with it were the center of church life. The Church, properly speaking, exists as a gathering in which the breaking of bread is performed in Christ's name. This has been so in every age, from the very beginning of church history. But "in the name" does not mean only "in memory," at least not in the sense in which we use that expression today. In the Bible we often meet expressions such as "God remembered" or "God forgot," although it is perfectly clear that, in our human sense, God forgets no one and nothing, and does not remember in that sense either; He simply knows all His creation as a whole and each of the people He created specifically.

But God is not an impersonal Absolute. He is a Person, and like every Person He can turn His face toward someone or turn away. This is what the language of the Bible calls "remembering" or "forgetting." And during the Christian breaking of bread, we Christians remember Christ, and He remembers us. Then the bread and wine again become His body and His blood, in the same sense in which this happened at the Last Supper. But for this to happen, He Himself must be at the center of the gathering.

And the issue is not only that He should come, but also that communion with Him should become the center and meaning of the whole gathering. In the Corinthian church, judging by the apostle's words, there were problems with this. The breaking of bread there sometimes turned simply into a noisy feast, and it often turned out that some ate and drank to excess while others remained hungry. The feast as such came to the fore, pushing communion with the Risen One into second place. The sacred act turned into profanation, not because there were food and wine on the table, but because behind them one could no longer see the One for whom and around whom they had gathered.

It is precisely against this, and not against the meal as such, that the apostle protests when he says that those who perform the breaking of bread in this way are not thinking at all about the body of Christ, not only in the sense of the bread they break, but also in the sense of the spiritual reality that is called the Church with a capital letter. This is no longer Christianity, but the same old paganism under the guise of Christianity, which cannot and must not exist in the Church.