Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 308 · November 4
Let a Man Examine
“But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup.”
More people have been kept away from the table by this verse than by anything else Paul wrote. Let a man examine himself, taken as an instruction to work out whether you are good enough to come, which is close to the reverse of what it does in the chapter.
I want you to see the meal he is describing, because it is not a quiet service with a wafer in it. The church at Corinth ate a full supper together, and it had gone wrong in a specific way. When ye come together in the church, I hear that there be divisions among you. For in eating every one taketh before other his own supper: and one is hungry, and another is drunken. The people with food were eating it in front of the people without. Paul's response is savage: have ye not houses to eat and to drink in? or despise ye the church of God, and shame them that have not? The self-examination he calls for is aimed at that table. Readers have taken the phrase in the next verse, not discerning the Lord's body, two ways, as the bread and as the congregation, and everything on either side of it is about the congregation.
Do the examining he actually asks for, which takes a different shape from the one you were taught. Before the next time bread is handed to you, work out who in that room you have been unfair to, and settle it with them before the plate goes round. If you are the one who arrives with plenty, his instruction is plainer still: tarry one for another. And if any man hunger, let him eat at home, so that the meal in the building never becomes a demonstration of who has more.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 308 is Known Completely (Psalm 139:2-3).