When I was a young man in graduate school, I learned that Corinth was having problems with the unity of the body, the church in that city. Also, when it came to the Lord's Supper, those who had goods were not waiting for those who had little or none, so when Paul talked about "discerning the body" (I Cor. 11:29), he was addressing those who were ignoring the unity of Christians that should be maintained but wasn't happening at Corinth.

As a young preacher at a small church in New Mexico, I shared this bit of graduate school wisdom. It so happened that an aged aunt of one of the Christians was visiting that Sunday. I can still remember her words, "That's not what that means!" I have been known to tell my students: little old ladies in the church are God's gift to young preachers. I was taken aback by this outburst, and at least to myself I wanted to prove her wrong.

But as I studied the passage, I found out that she was right. We must understand that words have a range of meaning. A person's speaking vocabulary is about 5,000 words and his listening vocabulary is roughly double that. But that limited vocabulary combined with a limited number of grammar constructions allows him to say an infinite number of things. This is possible only because words have multiple meanings which are constrained by the context. This constraint is strongest in the sentence containing it, followed closely by the immediate context of the paragraph. It is next influenced by the macro-paragraph or discourse containing it (or chapter, if it is well divided, speaking of the Scriptures). Finally, meaning is influenced to some extent by the book containing it and the author who wrote it. One cannot simply look at a dictionary or lexicon and choose a meaning that one likes. The context constrains which usage is meant.

In the passage at hand, the word "body" is used three times in the discourse on the Lord's Supper in chapter 11 (verses 17-34). In the immediate context, Paul has just written two verses before, "whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord" (v. 27). Here the body is associated with the bread and the blood with the cup. The fact that body and blood occur together makes it clear that the body referred to is the physical body of Christ on the cross where his blood was shed. The next back reference to the word body is in verse 25 where Paul recounts the institution of this sacred supper. There taking the bread Jesus says, "This is my body which is for you [plural]. Keep doing this in memory of me." The body here again refers to Jesus' physical body, not his metaphorical body, the church. It was "for" the church, not the church itself. The bread is eaten in memory of Jesus, remembering his body which suffered on the cross. Contextually then, the word body in verse 29 should refer to the same body as in verses 25 and 27. This is confirmed by the use of the article "the" in front of the word "body." The definite article points to the meaning of the word that is in active memory rather than a meaning that must be retrieved from elsewhere.

But someone will say, Paul in the context of the Lord's Supper in 10:17 uses the word body to refer to the church: "we who are many are one body." True enough, but a usage in a previous chapter (found two discourses previously), 45 verses away, cannot be determinative for the passage at hand. That usage is found in a discourse on meat offered to idols, where Paul argues that one cannot both share in the body and blood of Christ as well as at the table of the demons that receive the idol worship. And in 10:16, the sharing in the body and blood of Christ obviously is again a reference to Christ's death on the cross.

It is also true that Paul uses the word body metaphorically for the church in the following discourse on spiritual gifts (12:13, 27). But he also repeatedly uses the word body in that chapter to refer to a human body in general (12:12, 14-25) as an analogy. These forward references cannot be determinative for the meaning in the previous discourse in chapter 11.

Now if "discerning the body" in 11:29 refers to thinking about the body of Christ on the cross, what does that have to do with eating the bread and drinking the cup "in an unworthy manner" (literally, an adverb "unworthily"; verse 27)? The next two verses explain that phrase: one "must examine himself" (v. 28) and discern the body (v. 29). Sometimes people misunderstand the sense of the adverb and say, "I am not worthy to take the Lord's Supper because of sin in my life." But those are precisely the people who need to take the Lord's Supper in a worthy manner. They need to examine their life together with the memory of Christ's death for them and, out of that examination and memory, resolve to do much better in the coming week. This time of meditation is meant to help us grow spiritually. Sadly, we sometimes rush through this time and miss the growth. May God help us to experience the real meaning of the Supper.