25 Critical Lessons from 1 Corinthians 11: Head Coverings, the Lord’s Table, and the Warning That Frightens Many Christians

A believer hears 1 Corinthians 11:27 read aloud before communion, hears the word “guilty,” and lets the tray pass without touching it.

That fear is where a great many people meet this chapter, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a comfortable one. Paul wrote the warning. Paul also wrote the command to eat.

The lessons from 1 Corinthians 11 sit on both sides of that tension and will not let you keep one half without the other. What Paul defends here reaches past the ritual itself, down to what happens to a church when the people in it stop seeing each other.

Brief Summary: Lessons from 1 Corinthians 11

Paul corrects two things about the way the Corinthians assembled. He deals first with how men and women presented themselves while praying and prophesying, arguing from God’s ordering, from creation, and from the practice of the churches.

He then turns to their common meal, where some ate ahead of others and left the poor hungry, so that what they called the Lord’s Supper was not that at all. He repeats the words Christ spoke the night he was betrayed, warns against eating unworthily, calls each person to self-examination, reports the weakness, sickness and death that had followed, and ends with one plain instruction: wait for one another.

Read also: Book of 1 Corinthians Summary by Chapter

Lesson 1: Follow Any Leader Only as Far as He Follows Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1)

1 Corinthians 11:1: “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ.” (KJV)

You have probably admired a Christian whose faith looked further along than yours and wondered how much of their life you should copy. Paul answers that before anyone asks it. He invites imitation and puts a limit on it in the same breath.

The limit carries the weight of the verse. He could have said follow me because I am an apostle, or because I planted this church, and both were true. Instead he ties his claim on the Corinthians to his own following of Christ, so the invitation reaches exactly as far as his obedience does and no further. He makes the same appeal in 1 Corinthians 4:16, and he never once separates it from Christ.

That protects two people at the same time. It protects you, because no preacher owns your conscience. It also warns anyone that others watch, because a life held up as an example is being measured against a standard higher than itself. Loyalty to a person is safe only for as long as that person is following Someone better.

Lesson 2: Praise What Is Right Before You Correct What Is Wrong (1 Corinthians 11:2, 17)

1 Corinthians 11:2, 17: “Now I praise you, brethren, that ye remember me in all things, and keep the ordinances, as I delivered them to you… Now in this that I declare unto you I praise you not.” (KJV)

Paul is about to spend an entire chapter telling this church what it has got wrong. He opens by telling them what they have got right, and he means it. They had held on to what he taught them, and he says so plainly before a single correction lands.

Fifteen verses later he removes the praise. When he turns to their meal, he writes “I praise you not,” and the withdrawal only carries force because the praise was genuine in the first place. Flattery cannot be withdrawn, because it was never given.

Correction handled this way is far harder to dismiss. The Corinthians could not tell themselves that Paul had it in for them, or that he saw nothing good in them at all. He had already named the good, which meant the rebuke had to be faced on its own terms.

Most of us find it easier to lead with the fault, or to bury it so deep in encouragement that nobody hears it. Give the person in front of you the honest good first, then say the hard thing without softening it.

Read also: Lessons from 1 Corinthians 1

Lesson 3: God’s Order Has Christ Inside It, So It Cannot Mean You Are Worth Less (1 Corinthians 11:3)

1 Corinthians 11:3: “But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.” (KJV)

Does an ordering set by God say anything about the value of the people inside it? Paul answers that in the same sentence he uses to state the ordering, and the answer is built into where he puts Christ.

Read the verse to its final clause and watch what happens there. Paul does not stop at man and woman. He carries the pattern up into the Godhead itself and writes that the head of Christ is God. Whatever the arrangement means, it now includes the Son, who is fully God and in no sense inferior to the Father.

That closes off the reading this verse is most often used for. If order meant lesser worth, the sentence would be saying something about Christ that no Christian is willing to say. So the ordering has to mean something other than a ranking of value, because Christ is inside it and Christ is not diminished by being there.

Wherever you sit under authority, at home, at work, or in a church, this verse hands you a dignity that no one under you or over you can adjust.

Lesson 4: What You Do in Worship Is Visible, and Visible Things Carry Meaning (1 Corinthians 11:4-7)

1 Corinthians 11:4-5, 7: “Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonoureth his head. But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head… For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.” (KJV)

Paul spends fifteen verses on something anyone in the room could see. That alone tells you he did not regard what happens in a gathering as a private matter between each believer and God.

The reason he gives is glory. Verse 7 opens with “for,” which makes it the ground of everything before it, so the real question is whose glory is on display when the church prays.

The setting explains why. In first-century practice a covering carried a social signal, and sources on the period note that Roman men customarily covered the head when leading a religious rite while Roman women often went about uncovered, so the Corinthians were reading each other’s appearance constantly.

Verse 6 presses the logic further. If a woman rejects the covering, Paul says, let her be shorn as well, and if that is a shame, then be covered. He closes the door on keeping the respectability of a sign while discarding what the sign says.

Christians differ today on whether the practice itself still binds, and that difference deserves patience rather than contempt. What does not shift is the principle underneath it: what people can see you doing when the church gathers is saying something, whether or not you intended it to.

Lesson 5: Worship Happens in Front of Witnesses You Cannot See (1 Corinthians 11:10)

1 Corinthians 11:10: “For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels.” (KJV)

This is one of the hardest verses in the chapter, and honesty about that serves you better than a confident guess. Paul gives the angels as a reason, and he does not explain what the angels have to do with it.

What the verse does state is enough to matter. Something about the gathered church is of interest to beings the congregation cannot see, and Paul expects that to shape how the Corinthians conduct themselves. Commentators have offered several readings of why, and Scripture does not settle between them here, so anything further is an inference rather than a plain statement of the text.

Hold on to what is actually written. The room where believers pray is not as small as it looks, and the audience is larger than the people counted at the door.

That changes the feel of an ordinary service. What you do when you think the only people watching are a handful of familiar faces is being done in fuller view than that.

Lesson 6: Neither Man nor Woman Stands Alone, and Both Came From God (1 Corinthians 11:11-12)

1 Corinthians 11:11-12: “Nevertheless neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord. For as the woman is of the man, even so is the man also by the woman; but all things of God.” (KJV)

Every teaching can be turned into a weapon by someone determined enough, and Paul takes the weapon away before anyone can pick it up. “Nevertheless” is the hinge of the whole section, and what follows it is dependence running in both directions.

His proof is ordinary and impossible to argue with. Woman came from man at creation, and since then every man who has ever lived has come through a woman. Neither side can stand at the top of that arrangement, because each one owes the other its existence. Then Paul lifts the sentence away from both of them and lands it somewhere else entirely: “but all things of God.”

That last clause is where the section ends, and it is the clause most often left out. Any reading of this passage that finishes with one sex over the other has stopped short of where Paul himself stopped.

Read also: Lessons from 1 Corinthians 3

Lesson 7: Paul Trusted Them to Judge It for Themselves (1 Corinthians 11:13)

1 Corinthians 11:13: “Judge in yourselves: is it comely that a woman pray unto God uncovered?” (KJV)

Paul had every right to close this matter by command. He was an apostle writing to a church he founded, and he had just spent ten verses building his case from creation itself. Then he hands the question back to them and asks them to weigh it for themselves.

That is a striking piece of restraint, and it says something about how God grows people. A believer who has been reasoned with owns the conclusion in a way that a believer who has only been ordered around never does. Paul was after conviction in them, because compliance without conviction lasts only as long as the person enforcing it is in the room.

It also assumes something about them that flatters no one and respects everyone. Paul expected these Christians to be capable of honest thought about their own conduct, and he was willing to risk them reaching the wrong answer rather than take that capacity away from them.

When someone last tried to reason with you about your own conduct, how much of that conversation did you spend weighing what they said, and how much defending yourself?

Lesson 8: Answer the Contentious Spirit, Not Only the Argument (1 Corinthians 11:16)

1 Corinthians 11:16: “But if any man seem to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the churches of God.” (KJV)

You have met the person this verse is about. The argument has been made, the evidence is in, and they are still going, because the arguing itself has become the point.

Paul ends the section by addressing that person rather than the topic. He does not produce a sixteenth reason about coverings. He names the contentiousness, points to what the churches of God actually practise, and stops. Some disagreements are settled by better arguments. Others are exposed as something else wearing the clothes of a disagreement.

The tell is that fresh answers change nothing. Where the appetite for the fight outlives the question, more explanation feeds it. Paul’s response respects the person enough to name what is really happening and then declines to keep the fight alive.

Watch your own heart for that appetite the next time a church disagreement gets hold of you, and notice whether you actually want the matter resolved.

Lesson 9: A Church Can Meet Together and Come Away Worse (1 Corinthians 11:17)

1 Corinthians 11:17: “Now in this that I declare unto you I praise you not, that ye come together not for the better, but for the worse.” (KJV)

Attendance guarantees nothing. Paul states it about a real congregation, in writing, and the verdict is that their meetings were doing them harm.

That should unsettle anyone who has assumed that being present is the same as being helped. The Corinthians were gathering. They had the meal, the name, and the people in the room. What they came away with was worse than what they arrived with, and Paul lays the responsibility on how they treated each other rather than on the form of the service.

God is not indifferent to what happens between believers in his house. He takes what we do to one another as something done in his presence, which is why a gathering can leave a church poorer rather than richer.

When you leave a service, what is actually different about you, and how much of that depends on what happened between you and the people beside you?

Lesson 10: Weigh a Report Before You Believe All of It (1 Corinthians 11:18)

1 Corinthians 11:18: “For first of all, when ye come together in the church, I hear that there be divisions among you; and I partly believe it.” (KJV)

A report has reached Paul about a church he loves, and his response is one of the most useful half-sentences in the letter. He believes it in part.

He does not dismiss the report to protect his own picture of the congregation, and he does not treat the whole of it as established fact and open fire. He holds it at the weight it can carry and writes accordingly. Notice too that he says it out loud, so the Corinthians know exactly what he has heard and what he is doing with it.

Very few of us handle church news this way. A story about a leader or a member arrives, and it is either swallowed whole or thrown out entirely, depending on how we already felt about the person. Both reactions save us the work of finding out what is true.

Take the next report that reaches you about someone in your church and hold it the way Paul held this one: partly believed, honestly examined, and never repeated as though it were settled.

Read also: Is Malice a Sin?

Lesson 11: Division Shows Who Is Genuine (1 Corinthians 11:19)

1 Corinthians 11:19: “For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.” (KJV)

What good could possibly come out of a church tearing itself in two? Paul answers that here, and his answer is not the one most readers expect. Pressure in a congregation brings into the open what was already there, so that those who are approved become visible.

Nothing in the verse calls division good, and Paul spends the rest of the chapter working to end this one. What he says is that God is not wasting it. When a congregation is strained, the people who have been faithful without an audience stop being invisible, and so do the people who were only ever attached to the comfortable version of church life. The heat does not manufacture either group. It brings them to the surface.

That is worth knowing before the pressure comes rather than after. Seasons of strain in a church tend to sort people, and the sorting is rarely what anyone predicted from the outside. Reputations built on ease have a way of not surviving it, and steadiness nobody had noticed has a way of becoming obvious.

If your church is in a hard season, that is a sobering thought and a hopeful one at once, and it lands on you before it lands on anyone you could name.

Lesson 12: You Can Keep the Ceremony and Lose the Supper (1 Corinthians 11:20)

1 Corinthians 11:20: “When ye come together therefore into one place, this is not to eat the Lord’s supper.” (KJV)

Paul looks at a church holding bread and a cup, gathered in one place, calling the meal by the Lord’s name, and tells them that whatever they are doing, this is not the Lord’s Supper.

Everything visible was correct. The elements were there, the assembly was there, the words were presumably said. What was missing would not have shown up in a photograph, and its absence emptied the whole act of the thing it claimed to be. A church can hold every outward part of an ordinance and still be told by God that the ordinance did not take place.

That verdict reaches further than a communion service. A prayer can be prayed and not be prayer. A song can be sung and not be worship. Attendance can be perfect and fellowship absent. God has never been obliged to accept an act because it wore the right shape, and the Corinthians are the standing proof of it.

Where in your own walk have you kept doing something religious long after the reason for doing it left?

Lesson 13: Taking Yours First Shames the People God Loves (1 Corinthians 11:21-22)

1 Corinthians 11:21-22: “For in eating every one taketh before other his own supper: and one is hungry, and another is drunken. What? have ye not houses to eat and to drink in? or despise ye the church of God, and shame them that have not?” (KJV)

Picture yourself at a meal where some people are full and others are still hungry, and everyone in the room can see it. That is the scene Paul is describing, and the hungry ones were the poorest members of the church.

Roman meals of the period were commonly graded by rank, with better food and better places going to guests of higher status. Whatever the exact mechanics in Corinth, the social habits of the city had walked straight through the church doors and sat down at the Lord’s table.

Watch how Paul names it. He calls it despising the church of God and shaming those who have nothing, which lifts a horizontal offence into something done against God himself. James 2:1-4 brings the same charge about seating the well-dressed man well and pointing the poor man to the floor.

The modern shape of this is harder to spot, and it is rarely about food. It shows up in which people are noticed at the end of a service, which names get remembered, and who is left standing alone while the room organises itself around whoever matters most.

None of that requires malice. It only requires that everyone follow the ordinary social pull of the room, which is exactly what the Corinthians did.

Read also: Lessons from Luke 22

Lesson 14: Deliver What You Received Exactly as It Came to You (1 Corinthians 11:23)

1 Corinthians 11:23: “For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you…” (KJV)

Paul settles the argument by stepping out of it. He traces the practice back past himself, past the Corinthian church’s own habits, to Christ, and then repeats what he was given word for word.

That is a remarkable move for a man with apostolic authority. He could have argued from his standing. Instead he makes himself a courier, which means the Corinthians are not free to negotiate with him about the meal, because the meal was never his to alter. He says something similar about the gospel itself in Galatians 1:11-12, where he insists he did not receive it from any man.

Everyone who teaches, leads a group, raises a child in the faith, or explains Scripture to a friend stands in that same delivery chain. What we hand on is not ours to improve, edit for taste, or trim where it costs us something.

Guard the difference between what God said and what you would have preferred him to say.

Lesson 15: Christ Gave Us This Table on the Night He Was Betrayed (1 Corinthians 11:23)

1 Corinthians 11:23: “…That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread.” (KJV)

Paul could have told us only that Jesus instituted the supper. He dates it instead, and the date he chooses is the worst night of Christ’s life.

Everything was closing in. The betrayal was already in motion, the arrest was hours away, and the men at that table would shortly scatter. Luke records that even in that room the disciples were arguing about which of them should be counted the greatest (Luke 22:24). On that night, in that company, Christ took bread and gave his followers something to keep.

Sit with the timing before you move on from it. The supper came out of the hour when Christ had every reason to think about nobody but himself, and he spent it making provision for the men at his table.

That is the love the bread and cup carry. Every time you take them, you are handling something Christ prepared while his closest friends were hours away from abandoning him.

Lesson 16: Remembering Christ at the Table Is a Command to Obey (1 Corinthians 11:24-25)

1 Corinthians 11:24-25: “Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me… This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me.” (KJV)

Perhaps you have come to communion feeling nothing at all and wondered whether you should be there. The words Christ actually spoke over the bread and the cup answer that better than your feelings do.

He said “this do.” He said it twice, once over each element, and both times he attached it to remembrance of himself. Remembrance is something a believer is told to do, and telling someone to do a thing assumes they can do it whether or not the emotion has arrived. The command steadies you on the days the emotion has not.

Understand what that spares you. You are not required to manufacture a feeling before you are allowed to obey. You are required to turn your mind deliberately to Christ and what his body and blood accomplished, and very often the affection follows the obedience rather than leading it.

Come to the table with your attention rather than your mood, and give the Lord the remembering he asked for.

Read also: Story of Judas Iscariot in the Bible

Lesson 17: The Table Preaches His Death, and It Has an End Date (1 Corinthians 11:26)

1 Corinthians 11:26: “For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come.” (KJV)

Two things sit in this verse that you can easily read straight past. The supper is a public announcement, and it is temporary.

“Ye do shew” makes the meal an act of proclamation. A church taking communion is saying something out loud about a death that happened, without anyone needing to preach a word over it. And Paul gives the practice a horizon: “till he come.” Christ said the same thing at the table itself, promising in Matthew 26:29 that he would drink it new with them in his Father’s kingdom.

So this is a meal with an expiry date built into it, and the expiry is glad news. The bread and cup will one day be unnecessary, because the One they point to will be in the room.

Every communion service is therefore both a memorial and a countdown, and a church that grasps the second half of that will never take the supper as a solemn duty and nothing more.

Lesson 18: “Unworthily” Describes How You Come, Not How Good You Are (1 Corinthians 11:27)

1 Corinthians 11:27: “Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.” (KJV)

This is the verse that keeps sincere Christians in their seats while the tray goes past, and a great deal of unnecessary fear has been built on a misreading of one word in it.

Look at where “unworthily” sits in the sentence. It hangs on the eating and the drinking rather than on the eater, describing the manner in which a person comes to the table, and Paul repeats it the same way two verses later. The verse is asking how you are coming, and it leaves the question of your record where the gospel already put it.

Follow that through and the relief is obvious. If worthiness of person were the standard, the table would stand empty every Sunday, because no one has ever brought a worthy record to it. The very people most afraid of this verse are usually the ones least in danger from it.

The warning itself stands at full strength. Paul says guilty of the body and blood of the Lord, and the whole passage exists because such an offence was actually being committed.

So the person this verse warns is the one who comes carelessly, self-absorbed, indifferent to the people around them. The person conscious of their sin and grieved by it is the one Christ made the table for.

Lesson 19: Examine Yourself, and Then Eat (1 Corinthians 11:28)

1 Corinthians 11:28: “But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup.” (KJV)

Read the verse to its final word before you decide what it is asking of you. Paul commands self-examination and then tells the examined person to eat, which makes the examination the road to the table rather than the reason to avoid it.

Notice also who is being examined. A man examines himself. The verse gives no one a licence to assess the fitness of the believer sitting beside them, and a church that has turned communion into a season of mutual inspection has inverted the command. Paul says something similar to this same congregation in 2 Corinthians 13:5, where the searching is again turned inward.

In practice that means asking real questions instead of vague ones. Ask where you have wronged someone in the room. Ask where you have grown careless about what the bread and cup mean. Confess what surfaces, because 1 John 1:9 promises cleansing to those who do, and then come and eat as a forgiven person.

Let the examining end where Paul ends it, at the table and not away from it.

Read also: Steps of Repentance

Lesson 20: Failing to See the Body Is the Sin Paul Warns About (1 Corinthians 11:29)

1 Corinthians 11:29: “For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.” (KJV)

Paul finally names the failure, and the name he gives it points straight back to what he described eight verses earlier. Not discerning the Lord’s body.

Christians have read “the Lord’s body” in more than one way, and the reading that fits this passage best is the church itself, because that is the offence Paul has been documenting. Wealthy members had looked at hungry believers and failed to recognise them as part of the same body.

He had already told this church in 1 Corinthians 10:17 that the many who share one bread are one body. So the failure at the meal was a failure to see what the bread had already said.

The word rendered “damnation” here carries the sense of judgment, and Paul explains his own meaning three verses later when he distinguishes this judgment from being condemned with the world. Nothing in the verse puts a believer’s salvation back in question.

Who do you fail to see at church, and what would change on Sunday if you actually looked?

Lesson 21: Paul Named Real Consequences in That Church (1 Corinthians 11:30)

1 Corinthians 11:30: “For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.” (KJV)

Paul reports something happening in Corinth and connects it to what they were doing at the table. Many were ill, and many had died, and he says “for this cause.”

Take the seriousness of that at face value. God was dealing with a congregation about how they treated one another at his supper, and the dealing was not abstract. It is a sobering measure of how much weight he places on what happens between believers when they gather.

Take equal care with the reach of the verse. Paul is giving an inspired report about one congregation whose conduct he has just described in detail, and he stops there. He hands no one a rule for reading another person’s illness backwards to a hidden sin.

Christ himself refused that reasoning when his disciples tried it on a blind man in John 9:1-3, and he answered that neither the man nor his parents had sinned. Sickness has many causes, and a believer who is unwell has not thereby been convicted of anything.

Hold both halves together. God does discipline his people, and you were never appointed to read that discipline off someone else’s body.

Lesson 22: Judge Yourself and You Will Not Be Judged (1 Corinthians 11:31)

1 Corinthians 11:31: “For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.” (KJV)

There is a way out of the correction Paul has just described, and it costs nothing except honesty. Deal with yourself, and the Lord will not need to.

The logic is simple enough for a child to follow and hard enough for an adult to avoid for years. Sin a believer faces and confesses has already been dealt with, so God’s hand is free to leave it there. Sin a believer manages and excuses stays exactly where it was, and a Father who loves his children will eventually come for it himself.

Notice how much this puts within your reach. The God Paul describes here would far rather you came to the point yourself, and he has told you plainly how to spare yourself the harder route.

Name the thing you have been managing instead of confessing, and take it to God today before it has to be dealt with another way.

Lesson 23: God’s Correction Is Proof You Belong to Him (1 Corinthians 11:32)

1 Corinthians 11:32: “But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world.” (KJV)

If God has been dealing with you and it has been painful, this verse is the one to hold. Paul draws the line himself, and he puts you on the safe side of it.

What the Corinthians were experiencing is called chastening, which is the correction a father gives a child he keeps. Paul states its purpose in the verse itself, that we should not be condemned with the world, which means the discipline was working against that outcome rather than toward it. Hebrews 12:6 says the same thing without flinching: “whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth” (Hebrews 12:6).

None of that makes chastening pleasant, and Scripture never pretends it is. What it changes is the meaning you attach to the pain while you are in it. Correction from God is evidence of a relationship, and the child being dealt with is the child being kept. A father who had written you off would have nothing to say to you at all.

Read also: Lessons from the 7 Churches in Revelation

Lesson 24: Wait for One Another (1 Corinthians 11:33)

1 Corinthians 11:33: “Wherefore, my brethren, when ye come together to eat, tarry one for another.” (KJV)

After the theology, the creation argument, the institution of the supper and the warning about judgment, Paul’s remedy is four words long. Wait for each other. He had every reason to end with something weightier, and he ended with the one instruction the Corinthians could obey the very next time they met.

It sounds small until you have to do it. Waiting costs the person who is ready first, whose time is tight, who could have been served already and now sits there while somebody slower catches up.

Notice where that cost falls. Every practical fix for the Corinthian problem lands on the strong, the early and the well-supplied, which is exactly where Paul puts it, because they were the ones with something to give up.

Waiting is also how a church says out loud that nobody here is more important than anybody else. Keep an eye out on Sunday for whoever is being left behind while everyone else moves on.

Lesson 25: Deal With Your Appetite Before You Arrive (1 Corinthians 11:34)

1 Corinthians 11:34: “And if any man hunger, let him eat at home; that ye come not together unto condemnation.” (KJV)

What do you do about a genuine need that keeps getting in the way of what the church is trying to do together? Paul’s answer is refreshingly ordinary: handle it at home.

The hunger was real, and Paul treats it as real. He tells the hungry man to meet the need privately so that it stops distorting the gathering, which takes the man’s body seriously and the church seriously in the same breath.

That is a kinder instruction than it first sounds. Nobody is being told their need is imaginary or unspiritual. They are being told there is a right place for it, and that the assembly is not that place.

Most of what we carry into a service works the same way. Whatever is loudest in you when you walk through the door will shape what you take from the meeting and what you give to it, and a fair amount of it can be dealt with beforehand rather than carried in and set loose on everyone else.

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Conclusion

The believer who lets the tray go past is trying to honour something, and that instinct deserves respect rather than mockery. Paul’s own instruction to a frightened Christian was to examine themselves and eat.

That is where these lessons from 1 Corinthians 11 leave you. The warning is real, the guilt Paul names is real, and the God who chastens is the same God who chastens only the children he intends to keep. What emptied the Corinthian table was people who stopped seeing each other, and the remedy Paul gives is small enough to start this week: look at the person beside you, and wait for them.

Come to the table examined. Come needing it. Then take the bread and the cup, and remember the One who provided them on the night everything was taken from him.