Luminescence, Volume 2. C. K. Barrett
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speaking with tongues, and a neighbor from the flat next door puts his head around the door and shouts, “what on earth are you mad folk up to?” Fortunately, the tongue speaker stops and someone begins to prophesy—a bit like preaching. The visitor comes in and sits down. “Good heavens he might be talking about me. That’s what I like, that’s what I need. If God can do it for him, perhaps he can do it for me. I believe God really is here.”
At length, someone gets up and says, “Friends, I think most of us have finished. One more bite and one more sip. We have had our meal; the Lord had his, and before he went out to die, he said ‘eat in memory of me; drink in memory of me. So we proclaim his death until he comes again in glory.’”
I suppose I have been warming the mixture up a bit, but what I have just been saying is as good New Testament scholarship as I am capable of. This is what the Lord’s Supper was like in Corinth, and in many another place where Christianity began. We are having a simple sort of service today, but even so we shall not be doing what I should really like to do. I should like to have been able to say, “on July 25th we shall meet not at 10.30 but at 12.30, and we shall have the Sunday roast beef and Yorkshire pudding on the premises. And we shall talk together about our joys and our problems as Christians and our church members, and how we say our prayers, and how we can possibly pay for the roof. Then a dozen people will give us bits of Christian truth, and we will pray together. Then I or some better person will say, ‘Do you remember what Jesus did?’ We’ll do it in remembrance of him—remembrance that means faith, and loyalty, and love and service and obedience. It isn’t only the Yorkshire pudding; I couldn’t have produced that. And if I had, perhaps you would never forgive me. Perhaps now that we have only one service on Sunday, we could do it some Sunday evening, and if there are a few who would like, in thoroughly Methodist fashion, to share our understanding of Christian faith and life, not to mention our failures to understand Christian faith and life, they could do so. But that is not for me to say.”
Doing it in this way, mixing up dinner practice and the sacraments, trusting to spontaneous Christian reaction on the part of a mixed assembly, most of whom who had only recently emerged from heathenism, was a risky business. It is not surprising that before long the Church was taking refuge in service books to make sure everything was done decently and in order. But Paul should not have had occasion to tell us how things are done right if the Corinthians had not done them wrong, so we may be grateful to them.
I described a share-out, a faith supper. It was a fine idea. If I could afford it I brought enough for two or three, or four. When my poor fellow Christians arrived I said come on, there’s enough for all. And Saturday night was wonderful in the first instance because it was the best supper of the week. That was the ideal; and I suppose that as long as Paul stayed at Corinth, it worked. But when he left? Then things could change and they did. I could pop the champagne cork and bring out the foie gras, while my neighbors scrounged in the market and all they could manage was some beets to bring with them. “You needn’t,” says Paul, “call that the Lord’s Supper. It’s your own supper, and much good may it do you.” This is a good telling off.
Some things are missing that might have been there. He does not say, “Make sure you get the service books out and don’t deviate from them by a single syllable.” He does not say, “All of you wait until the Rev. Mr. So-n-So arrives. Don’t begin until he gives the word and stop eating when he says Let us pray.” He says only, “Wait for one another,” and reminds them of where it all started—“The Lord Jesus, in the night when he was betrayed, took bread and wine and gave thanks and said, ‘This is my body, this is my blood, this is the new covenant and they are for you. And so every time we eat and drink together we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.’” It’s enough to make the foie gras choke you, isn’t it?
Confronted by disorder at the Lord’s Supper, and that means lovelessness, he has in the end only one thing to say—Christ is coming! That was Paul’s way of dealing with problems. That and not historical reconstruction is the real theme of this sermon. This is where we begin, only to glance at the theme in three or four settings each of which could become a sermon on its own. A minute or two for each.
PREACHING
How do you begin to commend the Gospel in a strange place, where no one has ever heard the name Jesus? We ought to know because more and more this becomes the condition of our land. If we do not know, we shall grow into an aging ghetto, never renewed by an inflow from without. Paul knew the possibilities. There was wisdom. That meant philosophical thinking, arguing from nature to God. It meant also a fine style, and rhetorical polish, the art of persuasion. “I shall have nothing to do with that,” says Paul. “I don’t want your faith to rest on so insubstantial a basis as my cleverness. I have only one theme, one truth to present to you—Christ and him crucified. That is all.” And it was that which overcame the world. A successful mission, you might say too successful, and there were others who joined in it, so as to present to the people of Corinth a nice choice of preachers with the result—division.
DIVISION
“Paul is the man for me,” some said. “No, I am a follower of Peter.” “You are both wrong, Apollos is a better man than either of them.” So the church divided, and no church will stand in circumstances like these. They misunderstood their leaders who had no wish to be figureheads; in fact, each Corinthian is bolstering up his own ego by attaching himself to one of the notables.
How are we to deal with this? This time in an epigram, a rhetorical question—“Was Paul crucified for you?” They are fine people, Paul a great preacher, Peter an organizer, Apollos a theologian. But did any of them die on a cross giving their life for you? No! But there was one who did, and loyalty to him, not to any of his agents, is what matters. Another example, there was in Corinth a shocking case of immorality.
IMMORALITY
There was a man living with his father’s wife. “Well, why not? We are liberated people are we not? We have up to date views on such matters, and we are not shocked, indeed we are rather glad to be so modern.” What will Paul do now? Quite a number of things but they focus on two points. One is Passover, the Jewish feast of the last supper. Before you can celebrate it you must, in accordance with the old law, clean every scrape of fermenting matter out of your home. “Modern?” says Paul to the Corinthians. “You are out of date. Our Passover has already been sacrificed, you must catch up quickly by getting rid of every defiling thing in your house and company.” Why? Turn on another chapter from 5 to 6, for the answers. “You are not your own, you are bought with a price. The price he paid was the most frightful any one can give. He gave it freely for you so that you might be set free from evil and belong in holiness to him.” It may not look so serious, but it was.
INSENSITIVITY
You will always find differences between Christians in this world. Some will feel free to do things that others will think wrong, and sometimes by expressing this freedom in an immodest way they will hurt others, may sometimes even make them lose their faith. Here is another way in which the Corinthian Church was split down the middle. What is the answer to that one? Everything depends on how you think of your fellow Christian. If you think of him as an unprincipled libertine or if you think of him as an antiquated stick-in-the-mud, we know how you will treat him. There is only one way to think of him; he is your brother for whom Christ died. Think of him like that and it will govern how you treat him. So back to where we started at the supper.
AT THE SUPPER
There was poverty, gluttony, indifference, pride; there was also, though I have no time to talk about it, magic. If I say the magic words and do the magic rite, everything will be alright. I can behave as I please guarded by my magic talisman. And all Paul has to set against it is, “You proclaim the Lord’s death, until he comes.” And this is what he sets over against us as we meet here as a church family. Equally it stands over against the family meals to which in a few minutes we go home. What would Paul see in us if he were to meet with us? Far more importantly, what does Christ see in us? Bitterness, impatience, intolerance? Indifferent to need whether it is in Durham, or Sarajevo, or Sudan? The hypocrisy of a Christian exterior and a heathen heart? Does he see weariness, suffering, loneliness, disappointment, fear? One answer will do: a broken