📖WEB · 1 Corinthians 11:20
What does 1 Corinthians 11:20 mean?
"When therefore you assemble yourselves together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat."
— 1 Corinthians 11:20 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
But in giving you this command, I don’t praise you, that you come together not for the better but for the worse.
For first of all, when you come together in the assembly, I hear that divisions exist among you, and I partly believe it.
For there also must be factions among you, that those who are approved may be revealed among you.
When therefore you assemble yourselves together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat.
For in your eating each one takes his own supper first. One is hungry, and another is drunken.
What, don’t you have houses to eat and to drink in? Or do you despise God’s assembly, and put them to shame who don’t have enough? What shall I tell you? Shall I praise you? In this I don’t praise you.
For I received from the Lord that which also I delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night in which he was betrayed took bread.
Explanation
This verse comes in the middle of Paul's sharp rebuke of the Corinthian church for the way they were conducting their communal meals. In plain terms, Paul is telling them that whatever they are doing when they gather together, it does not deserve to be called "the Lord's Supper," even though that is what they claim to be observing. Their actual behavior has emptied the meal of its true meaning.
The context is essential to understanding the force of this statement. In the earliest church, believers often combined a shared communal meal (sometimes called a "love feast") with the observance of the Lord's Supper, the bread and cup that Jesus instituted at the Last Supper. In Corinth, this had gone badly wrong. As Paul explains in the surroun
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