“For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself if he does not judge the body rightly. For this reason many among you are weak and sick, and a number sleep.”

Can a person really die from abusing the Lord’s Supper? Such punishment seems quite harsh, even unimaginable in our modern world. Yet if we believe all Scripture is God-breathed, we must recognize it is entirely possible that some Christians today, even some churches, suffer as a result of abusing what the Lord has commanded us to do.

Some say this passage speaks metaphorically about becoming spiritually weak or dead. While spiritual consequences may certainly be involved, the terminology suggests physical results. We are reminded of James 5:13–20 and 1 John 5:20, where sickness and death are related to sin and prayer.

In context, when the Corinthians gathered for the Lord’s Supper, some seemed to have been gorging themselves at the expense of others who were lacking. Their selfish callousness was appalling.

Some interpreters suggest that the poor Corinthian Christians were the ones suffering weakness, sickness, and death (“sleep” being a common euphemism for death). The “he” who is the offender, in this case, caused the “many among you” to experience difficulties. There was no middle class in Roman society, and many converts were from among the slave class or were struggling at subsistence level. The well-off believers (speaking relatively) refused to share their food with those who had little or none. This interpretation sees the Lord’s Supper as an actual communal meal during which the believers were to be sharing their food together, and during which the Lord was to be remembered in the bread and wine (see Acts 4:32–35, 6:1–7 for the standard set by the infant church in Jerusalem). The tangible result was believers sick and dying because of the lack of sharing.

Yet, we have a precedent in Ananias and Sapphira, who carried on a pretense of sacrificial giving (Acts 5:1–11). God struck them dead! (We can see this foreshadowed in Leviticus 7:20, warning that anyone eating a sacrificial offering while unclean was to be put to death). While we may struggle with the harshness, God did not punish them because they held back some of their possessions but because they lied about it. Only God’s grace keeps us all from suffering because of our deceptions, particularly those that reflect our selfishness at the expense of other believers’ needs. He brings judgment of various sorts, and it is because of His mercy and grace that we are not all wiped out!

Lord, thank You for meeting us, Your church, for fellowship around the table.