Illness in Corinth

Having looked at four Christians who were sick, though not because of sin or unbelief, we must now turn our attention to a group of Christians who were sick because of their sin – the Corinthians referred to in 1 Corinthians 11:30.

The Corinthians

The situation in Corinth was extremely serious. There were divisions in the church, they tolerated immorality, and there was disorder in their worship. Their behaviour at the Lord’s Supper was just one example of this. In the early church the Lord’s Supper was far more than a modern Communion Service. It was a meal Christians shared together, but at Corinth this was being abused, some going ahead without waiting for anyone else. Some were actually getting drunk while others still remained hungry (1 Corinthians 11:21). It is because of this behaviour that Paul wrote:

27 Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord.

28 A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup.

29 For anyone who eats and drinks without recognising the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself.

30 That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep.

 

Verses 29 and 30 indicate that many of the Corinthians were sick because they did not recognise the Lord’s body. But what does the body of the Lord refer to here? T.L. Osborn, healing evangelist and zealous advocate of the doctrine that Jesus died for our sicknesses just as he died for our sins, has argued that, just as Christ’s blood was shed for the forgiveness of sin, so his body was broken for the healing of sickness. So Osborn believes that the Corinthians’ failure to recognise or discern the body (v. 29) and the sickness that resulted from it (v. 30) came from a lack of understanding that Christ’s body was broken for the healing of sickness:

When Jesus said: ‘This bread which is broken for you represents My body’, He expected us to understand that it was on His body that the cruel stripes by which we were healed were laid. Discerning His body properly (my italics) will bring deliverance from our diseases as discerning His shed blood will remove from us our sins”[1].

 However, it is unlikely that Paul intended the phrase not recognising the Lord’s body to be understood in this way.

First, Osborn’s view makes too great a distinction between the body and blood of Christ at the Lord’s Supper, between eating and drinking. Sickness, he says, is due to failure to be taught about the body of Christ as we have been taught about the blood of Christ. Christ’s blood was shed for the forgiveness of sin, his body was broken for the healing of sickness. It is because we do not understand this that we are sick. By this Osborn implies that if the Corinthians had understood that the body of Christ was broken for their sicknesses (as his blood was shed for their sins) they would not have been sick.

But the judgment Paul refers to (which in verse 30 results for some in sickness and even death) is a result of eating and drinking. He who eats or drinks in an unworthy manner (v.27) is guilty. That is why he must examine himself before he eats and drinks (v.28), and if he does not discern the body rightly (v.29) he eats and drinks judgment to himself. Thus for Paul the Corinthians were sick as much for the manner in which they were drinking as for the manner in which they were eating. This clearly invalidates Osborn’s view that it is failure to discern rightly the Lord’s body (as distinct from his blood) that results in sickness.

Secondly, Osborn’s position assumes that Paul is speaking of the communion bread representing the broken body of Christ when he refers to the body in verse 29. However, it is by no means clear that this is the right interpretation. Although the bread at the Lord’s Supper symbolises the body of Christ broken on the cross, we know that Paul also understands the church to be the body of Christ. So Gordon Fee comments:

The Lord’s Supper is not just any meal; it is the meal, in which at a common table with one loaf and a common cup they proclaimed that through the death of Christ they were one body, the body of Christ…. Here they must ‘discern/recognize as distinct’ the one body of Christ, of which they are all parts and in which they all are gifts to one another. To fail to discern the body in this way, by abusing those of lesser sociological status, is to incur God’s judgment[2].

Fee is almost certainly right about this. By their disgraceful behaviour (described in vv 17-22) the Corinthians were failing to discern the significance of Christ’s death, symbolized by the emblems of the Lord’s Supper. The communion bread is at very least a reminder that Christ’s body was broken on the cross, and the message of the cross had been Paul’s answer to the divisions in the Corinthian church in the opening chapter of the epistle (1:10-24).

So to behave at the Lord’s Supper in a way that created and perpetuated division was to fail to recognise the body. If Christ died for the church then the Corinthians’ behaviour revealed a serious lack of understanding concerning both the cross and the church. They were, at one and the same time, failing to discern the purpose of Christ’s body broken on the cross and the sanctity of the church, the body for whom he died. Understood this way, recognising the body has nothing to do with understanding that Christ’s body was broken for our sicknesses.

This brings us to the third, and by far the most serious difficulty with Osborn’s view which suggests that the Corinthians were sick because they had failed to understand a doctrine (viz. that physical healing is in the atonement). The context makes it perfectly clear that it was the Corinthians’ behaviour, not their understanding that was at fault. The sickness mentioned in verse 30 is a result of the judgment (v.29) which a Christian eats and drinks to himself if he does not recognise the body. This judgment is seen in verse 32 as a discipline from the Lord. The way to avoid it (vv. 33-34) is to wait for one another and, if anyone is hungry, to eat at home. This is with the express purpose that you may not come together for judgment.

These two last verses which are thus clearly linked with verse 29 also bring us back to the theme with which the passage was introduced in verses 17-22. Verse 21 describes the shameful behaviour of the Corinthians at the Lord’s Supper. It is in this context that eating and drinking unworthily (v.27) must surely be understood, and similarly the man who eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the body (v.29).

In short, the judgment for not recognising the Lord’s body was sickness. This judgment could be avoided (v.34) by remedying the disgraceful behaviour at the Lord’s Supper described in verse 21. It is to that behaviour, therefore, that the phrase not discerning the body must clearly be related and Osborn’s suggestion that the Corinthians were sick because they did not understand that healing was in the atonement is totally unconvincing.

Finally, it is questionable whether Osborn’s interpretation, which presupposes the doctrine that Jesus died for our sicknesses just as he died for our sins, is supported by the overall evidence of the New Testament. It is clear that the doctrine that Jesus died for sickness as well as sin is by no means explicit in 1 Corinthians 11:29-30. Indeed, if I have understood the passage rightly, it is not even implicit. And, even if one allowed that it might be implicit in this passage, this would surely demand some evidence that it is explicit elsewhere. It must be demonstrated at the very least that the doctrine was understood and believed by some Christians at the time of Paul’s writing to the Corinthians.

To be really convincing, however, it must be shown that the doctrine was known to and believed by Paul. Of course advocates of the doctrine believe that verses such as Matthew 8:17, 1 Peter 2:24, support the doctrine, but I have already argued that these verses, when correctly exegeted, do not. If I am right about this, then there is no evidence that such a doctrine either existed or was on the point of emerging when Paul wrote 1 Corinthians 11:29 and any interpretation which sees the doctrine as implicit in this verse must surely be rejected.

But how does all this apply to us today? If we have understood correctly that Paul was telling the Corinthians that many of them were sick because they were not in right relationship with their fellow members in the body of Christ, then surely there is a warning here for us. Of course, I am not suggesting that all sickness results from this. Neither am I saying that bad relationships will always cause sickness. But if it was a cause of sickness for many of the Corinthians, it must surely be possible that it might be a reason for some sickness today.

Finally, in saying this we must not forget the lessons we learned in the first part of this chapter. Just because some Christians may be sick because of their sins, it does not mean that all are. As we have seen, godly people like Paul and Trophimus and Epaphroditus and Timothy sometimes got sick, and godly people sometimes get sick today.

 

[1]Osborn, op. cit. p. 155.

[2] Fee, G.D., The First Epistle to the Corinthians, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1987, p.564.