IT SEEMS FITTING TO BEGIN with a focus on the biblical witness for the supper of the Lord (κυριακὸν δεῖπνον,1 Cor 11:20), which could comprise the story of the exodus and the first passover meal, or a close comparison of the various accounts of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples. I have decided to focus on Paul’s instructions about the Eucharist to the Corinthians because it is the earliest example of believers in Christ following Jesus’ commands to keep this meal and because, as Richard Hays says in his commentary, their “trouble serves for our instruction.”1 We can learn much about the meaning of this practice from Paul’s excoriation of their missteps.

In this chapter of 1 Corinthians, Paul is on a tirade against contentiousness (φιλόνεικος), or a party spirit, where one group is pitted against another; this, he says, has no place in the church of God (1 Cor 11:16). In the first part of the chapter Paul has been seeking to repair the gender divide, helping men and women to see the necessity of their mutual interdependence because of the creative glory of God manifest in creation and in the church.2 In the second half of the chapter, he turns his sights on the divide of class. God’s kingdom functions differently than the kingdom of the world and its ways; while the haves might acceptably distinguish themselves from the have-nots in society, Paul will not have that in the church.

My task in this chapter is two-fold: first, to describe as best as possible what interpreters can ascertain about the Corinthians’ practice of the Lord’s Supper and its dependence (or not) upon the words and life of Jesus. Second, I will suggest a few ways in which Paul’s exhortations for a meal that embodies Christlike compassion might inform our own sharing of the table. In these words of Scripture and the tradition, we realize both the cultural distance and the christological bond between the church in ages past and ourselves as we hear the call for faithful love and the promise of undeserved grace. My focus will admittedly be personal and local, but I hope to provide common commitments on which global and inter-denominational conversations could build. Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians remains true, I think, for all of us: this is the Lord’s Supper, and we rightly participate in it by remembering his goodness and grace.