Dennis Tuuri

Darkness around about him. Righteousness and judgment are the habitation of his throne. A fire goeth before him and burneth up his enemies round about. His lightnings enlighten the world. The earth saw and trembled. The hills melted like wax at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the Lord of the whole earth. The heavens declare his righteousness, and all the people see his glory. Confounded be all they that serve graven images that boast themselves of idols. Worship him all ye gods.

Let us pray. Almighty God, we come before you now to worship you in obedience to your call to worship as read in the holy scriptures. We thank you, Father, for graciously extending us the invitation to come together in holy convocation to give you praise and worship. But we do readily acknowledge and confess that you have made us aware of our sinfulness and that we have served other gods this past week.

Gods of selfishness, gods of the state, gods of our own sinful pleasures. Father, we acknowledge that we have transgressed your holy law in thought, word, and deed this past week. And we acknowledge, Lord God, that because of these sins, death is upon us. But we thank you that thou has given us gracious salvation through the covenant mediatorial work of Jesus Christ. We come before you forgiven of our sins.

We thank you, Lord God, for assuring us that because of Christ’s atoning work on the cross, our sins are atoned for and forgiven us. Your wrath has been put to peace toward us in Jesus Christ. And we thank you for giving us his righteousness in which we now appear before you imputed to us on the basis of his work and his holiness. Father, we thank you for calling us forward to worship. For causing us to understand our death and sins and our resurrection in our savior and the new life you’ve given to us.

Father, we pray now that you would accept this time of convocative worship in our savior Jesus Christ. In his name we pray. Amen.

Zion heard and was glad, and the daughters of Judah rejoiced because of thy judgments, oh Lord. For thou, Lord, art high above all the earth are exalted far above all gods. Ye that love the Lord hate evil. He preserveth the souls of his saints. He delivereth them out of the hands of the wicked.

Light is sown for the righteous, and gladness for the uprighted heart. Rejoice in the Lord, ye righteous, and give thanks at the remembrance of his holiness. The king all joy in thy strength, oh Lord. Thou hast given him his heart’s desire, for thou preventest him with the blessings of goodness. He asked wife of thee, and thou gavest it to him. His glory is great in thy salvation. For thou hast made him most blessed forever.

For the king trusteth in the Lord. Thine hand shall find out all thine enemies. Thou shalt bake them as a fiery oven in the day of thine anger. Their food shalt thou destroy from the earth. For they intended evil against thee. Therefore shalt thou make them turn their back. Be thou exalted, Lord, in thine own strength.

The text for this morning is found in 1 Corinthians 11, the 11th chapter beginning at verse 17. 1 Corinthians 11:17-34.

Now in this that I declare unto you, I praise you not, that you come together not for the better, but for the worse. For first of all, when you come together in the church, I fear that there be divisions among you, and I partly believe it. For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you. When you come together, therefore, into one place, that is not to eat the Lord’s supper.

For in eating, everyone taketh before another his own supper, and one is hungry, and another is drunken. What have you not houses to eat and to drink in? Or despise ye the church of God and shame them that have not. What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you in this? I praise you not. For I have received of the Lord, that which also I delivered unto you that the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “Take, eat. This is my body which is broken for you. This do in remembrance of me.” After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, “This cup is the new testament in my blood. This do ye as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you do show the Lord’s death till he come.

Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread and drink this cup of the Lord unworthily shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself and so let him eat of that bread and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body. For this cause many are weak and sick among you and many sleep. For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord that we should not be condemned with the world.

Wherefore, my brethren, when you come together to eat, carry one for another, and if any man hunger, let him eat at home, that you come not together unto condemnation, and the rest will I set in order when I come.

But I’ve decided to change next week’s sermon. So the bulletin this morning is not correct. I’m going to follow up this morning’s talk next week with an extended discussion of 1 Corinthians 13. And that’ll become obvious why I do that as we get through the portion of this morning’s message on the agape. So the talk listed for next week won’t be given. Instead, we’ll be talking about 1 Corinthians 13, love and action.

This morning we’re to move in our discussion of worship here at Reformation Covenant Church. Something that is, as far as I know, somewhat unique in terms of our church and sets it apart from other churches in the area certainly and really from most of Christendom at this point in time.

Now what we did this morning in terms of the processional may strike you as somewhat unique, but that is really much more common to the history of the church. The idea of a processional as we come forward to worship is more common in church history than what we’ll be discussing this morning. I don’t want you to think by that this is something completely unique in the history of the church. We’ll be discussing as first part of our talk this morning the reality of the agape, or love feast, in the early church.

But from about the time—certainly by the sixth or seventh century—the agape was essentially abandoned by Christianity. And apart from little tiny movements here and there to recover it, it is still abandoned to this day except here at Reformation Covenant Church. That certainly would cause us all to wonder what we’re doing, why we do this every week, why we have a meal between the two halves of our formal worship service.

Now I said formal worship service. We’ve talked about the synaxis and the Eucharist. Synaxis comes from the word for synagogue, which means the gathering. We gather together. We hear the preaching of the word. We then have a time of informal worship around the dinner table down below with the agape, or the love feast. And then we go back into formal convocative worship at the second half of our formal worship service at the end of the meal, which is the Eucharist, which means to give thanks, which has to do with the Lord’s supper and communion.

And after we finish these two talks on the agape, we’ll move into a discussion of three or four weeks on communion itself. And as I said before, we’ll deal with that somewhat more topically than in the linear fashion that we moved through the first half of our worship service over the last 11 weeks.

So our practice is different from other churches, and I hope this morning to discuss why we do it, get you an understanding of what we’re doing downstairs, what should be the emphasis of our meal together.

It may be somewhat more acceptable to us than the processional in terms of being familiar with us in our homes. We have meals at home. We have meals with other people. We have meals with our employers. Sometimes we have church or rather company picnics, banquets of those sorts. And we’ll see as we go through this outline this morning that in the early church, those same associations were common in the extended community and the cultures in which the churches lived.

But as I said, in terms of actual worship on Lord’s Day observances, what we’re doing is unique. And so I want us to take some time to explain why we do it, why we believe it’s very appropriate to have a common meal, a love feast together. And then also the significance of that for our life outside of the four walls of the church. We’ve said that worship is a model for life. And so we’ll be getting to the last part of our talk this morning to show that correlation and why the agape is so important.

If you’ve read the outline, you’ll notice that the last point is the agape—an idea whose time has come for the church gathered, for the church scattered, and for the church triumphant. And so I think it is important, and what’s taught in the agape is vitally important if we’re to have success and victory in kingdom work.

Okay. The agape is somewhat of a mystery. And when you go to study the thing out, it seems real simple—a love feast where love is stressed—and you’d think it wouldn’t be all that complex. But indeed, when you try to search out the historical records of what the church did for the first four, five, or six hundred years, it becomes quite complex. Part of this, of course, is that the customs and celebration of the agape died out after the year 500 or 600 or so, and so we don’t have very much current information on it in the development of the church liturgies that we have in the other parts of worship.

So we’re reading something happening anywhere from 1,900 to 1,300 years ago. And that’s tough to figure out exactly what happened, particularly when the writings we have are small in number and they’re written for specific purposes. And so we’re trying to discover what the church—early church—did from afar. Remember, too, that perhaps the church of the fifth or sixth century may not have had much more information about the church of the first or second century than we do.

And so sometimes we think that when things are back that long ago and tightly grouped within 500 years, they’d be more consistent or cohesive. But no, remember there was a long period of time. There weren’t computers yet at that point in time, and there wasn’t a great amount of retrieval of data available to people. And so it was easy for the thing to sort of transmute fairly rapidly over the course of two or three hundred years. And I think we’ll see that’s what happened to the agape.

Another reason why the agape, or love feast, is difficult to ascertain what it is: the terms used. It’s simply referred to as the agape, which is a word that we know is originally really—agape is translated love. And so it’s a love feast, a dinner in which love is emphasized. But the title of it doesn’t help as much. It just says love. Indeed, the agape’s connection to communion or to the formal Lord’s supper—that you probably mentioned as we’re reading through 1 Corinthians 11, and we’ll return to in a couple of minutes—is another reason why it’s complex to figure out what happened.

They were closely linked in the beginning of church history in terms of the New Testament church. So that’s another reason why it’s hard to discern what was going on. And sometimes you read about the breaking of bread and you don’t know if they’re referring to the Eucharist, the formal Lord’s supper, or if they’re referring to the agape, or love feast. The Eucharist itself, as I said, sounds like a real technical term, but it just really meant to give thanks.

And so these terms that were used were very indicative of what was happening, but they don’t give us a lot of clues as to why they decided this was a good thing to do. So it is somewhat of a mystery. And you’ll see church historians sort of struggling with it and what actually was going on. I think that part of the reason though for this failure to understand the agape and what it teaches and why it’s important for us is because, again, of a short Bible approach.

I think when we get to the Old Testament side of this, we’ll see the Old Testament antecedents and roots for the agape, and that will clear things up pretty well.

Okay. So the first part of our outline is we’re going to be tracking the mysterious agape. Sorry for the little humor there. But it is somewhat mysterious what we’re doing. Other churches don’t understand it, and it’s mysterious to church historians as well.

Okay. First we’re going to look at the agape in church history. And if you’re sharp and you look at the outline, you’ll notice that we’re sort of doing in reverse what we have talked about before—doing it the other way around. Instead of going from case law to historical book to gospel to epistle and then looking at application, we’ll look at how the church interpreted all this information to them in the first couple of centuries of the church, and then we’ll trace our way back to the Old Testament.

Okay. In the first couple of centuries of the church, we find that the agape was essentially linked and almost identical with their concept of communion or Eucharist. One example should suffice here. Ignatius, in his epistle to the Smyrnians, said that it’s not lawful apart from the bishop to do two things: to baptize or to hold an agape, a love feast. You see, the two primary things the bishops were responsible for were baptism and, on the other side, to seal the covenant, which is communion.

And so Ignatius in this quote equates the love feast with communion, although he uses the term agape, and it was commonly understood that referred to the meal. So it was so identified in the first couple of centuries of the church. They were always linked together, spoken of as one affair here. And so in this epistle from Ignatius, he says these meals happened. So we have evidence the meals occurred. And secondly, he says they were linked to the Eucharist. That’s by implication of what he writes there. So they happened together.

Now by the end of the first century, or by the end of the second century, however, there was some separation beginning to occur between the two events—the agape and the more formal Eucharist. The Christians in second century Bithynia seem to have ceased holding agape, and there’s a specific reason for that: that was because the Roman emperor, the Roman emperor Trajan, strictly enforced a Roman ban against such clubs.

Now I said that we have company picnics today, and in Rome there were lots of fraternal organizations in the first couple of centuries of the church that had meals together—secret societies—and the Romans became less and less tolerant of things that they didn’t control or sanction. And so in the second century, some of the laws that had banned some of these secret organizations, which had been in effect for quite a long time, began to be more strictly enforced in Bithynia.

And so the churches, at least from the written record, seem to have begun to abandon the agape under pressure from the civil state, because the civil state couldn’t control such things. It wants to either control something or eliminate it in terms of the Roman empire. And so the Christians began to move away from it. However, even there you got—now remember that this doesn’t necessarily tell us the practice of the second century church in response to the Roman government.

It tells us the official recorded records of what occurred. You understand what I’m saying there? If it’s against the law to worship, we probably won’t be reading a lot about worship services in that country recorded in their official histories or in their writings to one another. When the government seeks to suppress an activity, it may disappear from the record books, but it probably won’t disappear from the activity itself.

So there’s reason to believe that perhaps the agape continued even in second century Bithynia, but it went underground, as it were.

Now by the time of the third century, Tertullian—who has written pretty extensively on the Eucharist and, again, on the agape and again uses the agape to indicate both the formal Lord’s supper and the meal together—he sees those as analogous, the same thing. He writes about this the following. He says, “How much it may cost us—speaking specifically of the agape, the love feast—it is real gain to incur such cost in the cause of piety. For we aid the poor by this refreshment. We do not sit down to it till we have first tasted a prayer to God. We eat to satisfy our hunger. We drink no more than befits the temperate. We feast as those who recollect that they are to spend the night in devotion. We converse as those who know that the Lord is in ear witness to our conversations.”

So from that quote of Tertullian’s, we see a lot of pictures of the early agape and how it was practiced. He talks about aiding the poor, and charity very early on began to be associated with the agape. And we’ll talk more about that as we go along. He talks about the eating and how the eating was done temperately. We didn’t eat a lot. We didn’t drink a lot. We were temperate in our ingestion of the particular elements of the agape.

And by the way, in the fourth century, Augustine tells us that the agape frequently consisted of fish, cheese, meat, poultry, milk, and honey—rich sort of food. But Tertullian is emphasizing here that with all this richness of banquet before us, we don’t eat excessively. We eat temperately.

So we have the idea of charity. We have temperance stressed by Tertullian. He says, “We recollect that we are spending the night in devotion.” This was happening at the end of their formal worship service as they’re moving into the evening, and they were spending the night in devotion one to another in love.

And he says, “We converse with one another as those who know the Lord is an ear witness. So whatever we say at our agape, we know that Jesus is with us, and he’s always with us, of course, but in that sense it’s more heightened awareness that we’re in the context of the covenant community, Jesus’s kingdom community. And so remember that he’s an ear witness to us. And so we’re very careful how we deal with one another.

So we have sensitivity to one another. We have temperance. We have fear of God involved in that. The assistance to the poor, and these are some of the characteristics then of the agape in the third century according to Tertullian.

Clement also wrote about food versus substance. And he said that the food is not really the idea of the agape. The real idea behind it is the love we show for one another. And Clement gives us the idea there that really what was strengthened and pictured in the agape was the love for one another, which I guess is pretty obvious, but it’s very important that the historical record tells us that as well.

From other historical accounts, we find out that at the agape, or meal together, there was a recital of accounts respecting the affairs of other churches in other areas. Accounts would be regularly transmitted from one church to another. They’d be read in the context of the group gathered around the dinner table during the agape, leading up to communion. A deep sympathy was produced for the church outside of the four walls of that particular local church. There was an emphasis upon the church in other parts of the kingdom as well.

In many of these cases, assistance was decided at that point to be sent to various churches in response to some of the letters they would have read to them. And at the close of the festivity of the feast, historical accounts tell us that money was collected for widows and orphans, the poor, and for prisoners. And so we have again there the idea of a meal, a common sharing in body life. And the body life is seen as outside of the local church, involving other churches as well. And then an emphasis upon charity.

Additionally, now again in the third century, Cyprian writes of an agape. He says, “Since this is a holiday rest and time of leisure—whatever remains of the day, and talking about the Sabbath day, the Christian Sabbath rather than the Lord’s day—whatever remains of the day, now that the sun is sloping toward evening, let us spend it in gladness. Nor let even the hour of repast be without heavenly grace. Let the temperate festivity resound with psalms. And as your memory is tenacious and your voice musical, undertake this office as is your wont. You will provide a better entertainment for your dearest friends if, while we have something spiritual to listen to, the sweetness of religious music charms our ears.”

And so from that account in the third century by Cyprian, we have the idea that there was singing, there was an emphasis upon gladness and joy, an emphasis upon spiritual truth, and a rejoicing together in community.

Some of the specific church orders of the second and third century church have specific instructions for how the agape was to be celebrated. And in some of those orders, for instance, the breaking of bread was the beginning of the agape itself. Now, that’s a separate breaking of bread from what would follow that, which would be the communion feast.

Remember at this point in church history, there were those people in the church who were not admitted to communion for whatever reason—weren’t instructed well enough, hadn’t gone through penance well enough, or whatever—they couldn’t get communion, but they could be there for the love feast. And so the breaking of bread was the formal starting of this meal together after the first half of their worship as they moved into the communion, very much like we do here at Reformation Covenant Church.

And so there are actually church orders that tell us specific instructions for the order of the agape itself as part of worship. What’s interesting though is that toward the end of the third century and by the fourth century certainly, the agape is essentially now identified with charity—in the sense of helping poor people or helping those who are less fortunate. And in fact, by the end of the third century, by some of the writings of the Apostolic Constitutions, some of their later writings in the third, fourth, or fifth century, we find out that the term agape is now used to refer not to a meal at all, but to a love gift offered to a widow—okay, apart from any kind of meal.

And so what’s happening by the fourth or fifth century, and certainly into the following centuries, is that the agape is more and more seen as a charity function. In fact, one writer in the encyclopedia writing about the agape says that the agape as a means of charity was replaced by perhaps less personal but more efficient means of providing charity for people. And so it really got to be away from this idea of a joint celebration and more to the idea of charity and giving of alms to poor people and widows and orphans, etc.

Okay. By the late fourth century, there was a growing practice of abandoning the agape, or the love feast. And so in the Council of Gangra, written approximately 353 mid-fourth century, for the first time formally condemns the abuses of the agape. And it says this: “If anyone despises those who in faith hold agape and who for the honor of the Lord invite the brethren to meet, and if he be unwilling to take part in these invitations because he holds what takes place in common, let him be anathema. We approve of the church assemblies as being for the public good and pronounce a blessing on single acts of charity done to our brethren.”

And so from that statement, we find a couple of things out by the late fourth century. We find again the identification of the agape with charity. They say we approve of these things as they’re done for charity of the brethren. And but then secondly, that they’re under attack from various people who wouldn’t have come to the agape or would hold private agape with their own friends in their own home, apart from the church meal together.

And this church council said, “Let him be anathema”—who doesn’t support the church agape or love feasts—an attempt to keep them in place, even though they had been essentially transmuted into an act of charity as opposed to a church community banquet. And this attempt to keep the agape in place was really not at all successful.

By the fourth and fifth centuries, the agape had fallen into somewhat of disuse. And we start to read various occurrences in the fourth or fifth century of abuses of the agape, and that disorderly things were happening. And in any event, some of the other councils began to declare in the late fourth century that communion must be preceded by fasting, by fasting. And that, of course, served to break the agape off from communion because you couldn’t have a meal first and then take communion if you had to fast first.

And so the church councils, the ecclesiastical ordinances themselves, began to say you can’t have an agape prior to communion. The response was to put the agape at the end of the day and to break it off from communion and put it after communion. And then eventually even any holding of agape at all was forbidden by church councils.

And by the sixth and seventh century, not only had they been forbidden, but they had actually now said, in 692, that excommunication was ordered for anybody who persisted in holding love feasts. So essentially what we have is the beginning of the agape celebrations coming out of the New Testament church. And we’ll get to some of those writings in a minute. For a couple of centuries them being in place. For a couple of centuries them being transmuted into acts of charity and being not really essentially anymore the gathering of the brethren, but now primarily a way to pass on charity to widows and orphans and strangers. And then you have the ecclesiastical ordinances prohibiting them and breaking them off from the celebration of communion, and actually getting rid of them altogether.

And so that’s kind of a brief overview of all church history relative to the agape.

So let’s sum up some of this stuff that we’ve talked about here. We said that the agape was a dinner. It was a dinner with communion as the norm for at least the first 200 years. And at least in the first couple of centuries, it preceded communion. Later, it began to be at the end of communion because of the ecclesiastical ordinances against fasting and also because the ecclesiastical liturgies that grew up around the communion side of the service specifically, you began to have some high liturgical things happen that made no room for this kind of informal feast just prior to communion.

We said that the extension of grace was essential to the dinner in the first five or six centuries of the church, and in fact eventually came to supplant the whole idea of the agape. We’ve said that love and joy were essential to the meal, and we said that the fear of God was also essential. Remember what was said: that we speak as those who realize that the Lord is an ear witness to what we do, and we do so reverently. We have our love feast reverently and devotionally.

Okay. Now let’s go back to the scriptures then and see what gave rise to this practice of the agape in the first four or five centuries of the church. And I think we’ll see more and more evidence of why they did what they did in holding these agape.

We’ll turn now to the agape—the record of the agape in the epistles. First, Jude, verse 12. If you could turn there for a minute, Jude verse 12. Jude is just before the book of Revelation in your Bibles, after the three epistles of John. Jude is written about various heretics or people that cause scandal or division in the church. And verse 12 of Jude says the following:

“These men, these men that he is warning them about, are those who are hidden reefs in your love feasts when they feast with you without fear, caring for themselves.”

And then he gets into a long description of how terrible they are—clouds without water, etc. What I want you to notice here is that the term agape is here—the only place in scripture used for a love feast. This is the only occurrence, except for one in Second Peter we’ll look at in a minute, but it’s a variant reading. We’ll get to that in a second. But this is essentially the reason why the New Testament love feast is known as an agape.

And its evidence is plainly stated here by Jude that there were these meals together called an agape, a love feast. And that these guys coming into these love feasts were eating with you or really doing so improperly. And one of the two reasons for their improper celebration of the love feast: they are without fear, and they care for themselves.

Okay. And remember we said that couple of the characteristics of the early church’s observance of the agape was a reverential fear of God as near witness and secondly a concern and a demonstration of grace and charity to other people. You weren’t supposed to be self-centered. You were supposed to be fearful of God, and you were supposed to be devoted to helping other people as well. These people did neither in Jude 12.

So Jude 12 gives us the occurrence of the term agape, the reality of the first century meal, and in the scriptures condoned by the scriptures—at least it tells us about problems that existed with the celebration of the agape.

In verse 16, these men that have broken in are said to be those who are fulfilling their own lust. In verse 16, he said, “These are grumblers, finding fault, following after their own lust. They speak arrogantly, flattering people for the sake of gaining an advantage.” And so this picture of those who abuse the agape is those who are following their own lusts. And they probably were revelers in terms of food and drink at these feasts as well. And plus they cause dissensions. It tells us that quite clearly in verse 19: “They cause divisions among you.”

Instead of being united, which the agape is supposed to do, these guys are violating the agape by not fearing God, by being divisive, and by focusing on food and their own sensual pleasures at these meals.

Okay? And then Jude commands the people that he’s writing to, in verse 22, to have mercy on some. He exhorts them two acts of charity and kindness and love toward each other in response to the warning about these people that have broken into their agape.

Okay, so Jude 12 tells us of the existence and again tells us there should be fear, a caring for each other, an extension of grace, and not a focus upon the food and on division, but rather unity.

Second Peter 2:10. Just a couple of pages before this. Second Peter 2. Second Peter occurs just before the three epistles of John. So it’s just like three or four books before Jude. Second Peter 2, verse 10. He is warning them again here. He says that especially those who indulge the flesh in its corrupt desires and despise authority, daring self-will, they do not tremble when they revile angelic majesties.

And so he’s warning about the same sorts of people here. Then if you keep reading on along in that into verse 13, he says, “Suffering wrong as the wages of doing wrong. They count it a pleasure to revel in the daytime. They are stains and blemishes, reviling in their deceptions as they carouse with you.”

That’s verse 13. And if you’ve got a New American Standard Bible and perhaps some of your other Bibles as well, there’s a footnote out there from the word deceptions where they revel in their deceptions. And it says that some ancient manuscripts read “love feasts.” And I think that’s probably incorrect. And what Peter is doing here is he’s drawing a literary pun to the love feast. He’s saying instead of having an agape, they are having these revelings, and the word for reveling looks similar to and is similar in form to the word agape.

So Peter is warning about the same sorts of people that Jude are. And by doing that he is also acknowledging the fact that there were these feasting—appropriate agape—in the first century or in the New Testament church. But these people were again acting in violation of the agape. And again the same problems are stressed in Jude 12: they despise the authority, they’re not fearful of God, they are daring and they are self-willed.

Okay. Now to 1 Corinthians 11, which is what we read as we began the sermon this morning. 1 Corinthians 11. You can turn there, please. And in 1 Corinthians 11, as we read through that, which is probably a fairly familiar passage to most of us, Paul is obviously speaking here of communion, but he’s also obviously speaking of a meal that took place along with the communion.

He speaks of elements being there besides communion elements. He speaks of a meal together. And so Paul also tells us that there is an agape, although he doesn’t use the term, but he describes a meal together which is being violated by the people at Corinth that he writes to.

And if you look at the flow of 1 Corinthians 11, what he’s saying is that you’re causing divisions again. That’s how he began the section in verse 17. He says, “I hear that there are divisions and factions among you.” Same thing that Jude 12 and Second Peter warned about—people that violate the agape through divisions.

There’s an obvious reference to a meal here. It’s not an ordinary meal. It is a religious meal. And in fact, what he says in verses 20 and 21, when he says, “Therefore, when you meet together, it is not to eat the Lord’s supper.” The Lord’s supper there seems to be a reference not to just the bread and wine at the end of the meal, but the whole meal that he’s talking about, which was appropriate for them to take, but which they have violated by eating their own food first before other people eat.

Okay? And so Paul is saying at the Lord’s supper—he uses the term apparently to talk about the whole picture of the agape with the formal communion service at the end of it. And he’s saying when you come together and you eat your meal before somebody else, and you don’t share with the poorer people, and the rich eat their rich food, the poor have to eat nothing or go hungry. He’s saying that’s a violation of the idea of the agape or the Lord’s supper and of communion itself. And you will then end up drinking judgment to yourself.

Now that’s the context for the whole idea of discerning the body, which we’ll talk about in a few weeks. But the point is the whole context for the admonition to discern the body I think refers primarily to the body of Christ as it is pictured at the love feast. Everybody joined together, Christ’s body in the church. Okay. So the agape is supposed to teach the unity of that, and the people in Corinth were disturbing the unity of that and were causing divisions by being again selfish, by eating their own sensual food first and indulging their senses instead of realizing that the purpose of this meal is not the food we eat. The purpose of this meal is the unity we have together in the context of the church, and they violate that and so Paul takes them to task.

Now, so there’s an agape here pictured. There’s a supper eaten, and there are problems evident in it.

One other reference to agape that I want to throw in at this point in time is found in 1 Peter 5:14. Don’t worry about looking it up right now, but we read there the expression “the kiss of love” or the “kiss of agape.” And we find from the historical records that in the agape feast is where the kiss of love, later called the holy kiss, where Paul says greet each other with a holy kiss—that kiss was given in the context of the agape feast. That’s where it was performed.

And in 1 Peter 5:14 we actually read of that kiss as an agape, also an agape, or love.

Okay. So throughout the witness of the epistles in the New Testament, we see the validity of a meal in conjunction with the celebration of the Eucharist found in these three passages. There seems to be no thought in the New Testament—at least in writings of the epistles and the book of Acts—to really having communion without a meal. Always the expression is one of having a meal together and not just a symbol or token meal.

And so it appears from the New Testament evidence that the early church was on the target when they had communion in the context of an agape or love feast together. The early church was on good ground celebrating the agape. But I think that we ought to understand now why they did that in the New Testament church as well.

And so if we go to the Gospels for a couple of minutes, we’ll begin to see some of the reasons for that as well.

So let’s look at the agape in the Gospels. It’s not referred to as an agape, but the meal accompanying communion that is found. And of course, we find in Matthew 26 and in Mark 14 the accounts of Jesus at the last supper, at which communion is inaugurated or initiated according to 1 Corinthians 11, the verses we read.

Jesus initiated communion at that last supper. And the important thing I want you to recognize from these accounts is in both Matthew 26 and in Mark 14, as well as the other gospel accounts, the account reads that at the end of the meal together is when Jesus took the bread and the wine, gave thanks for it, and said, “This is the new testament in my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.”

And so Ershine, for instance, points out that the bread was taken at the end of the meal—the dessert, almost, at the end of the meal—is what was going on here. The meal had been completed. The accounts are clear of that. And so I think that when the early church, in the book of First Corinthians and the accounts of the early church in the book of Acts, all they were doing was following the pattern that our Lord had given them by having a meal and at the end of the meal communion with it found in Matthew 26, Mark 14.

Now, it’s interesting that in Luke 22, the account of the book of Luke of the last supper, in addition to the meal being recounted and communion happening at the end of the meal, there was also a teaching explicitly pointed out there by our savior. And that teaching is on service—service one another. He says, “I’m among you as one who serves. The Gentiles ruled over you.” Again, stressing in that meal, when he washed their feet, the idea of serving one another and the unity of the body and not seeing ourselves as more important than others and causing divisions.

And then finally, we don’t have time to look at all the references, but in John, in the account of the last supper in the book of John from chapters 13-17, we have again at the end of the meal the initiation of communion itself, but again it’s in context of a greater meal. And there’s much more teaching in these chapters on very essential elements of the agape.

In chapter 13:34, Jesus gives them a new commandment. He gives us the commandment in the context of a meal leading up to communion. And he, in the context of all that he teaches them a new commandment. What is that commandment? The commandment is to love one another—love, agape. That’s what agape means in its original sense: to love.

“And by this love men will know that you’re my disciples,” he tells them. “If you love one another.” Now in chapter 14:1-15, he links the love to the keeping of his commandments. In verse 21, again he links love and the keeping of commandments. And in chapter 15:12, he links together joy, love, and the law.

And so in Jesus’s discussion of what the significance of this meal, the agape, and communion is, he teaches them about the necessity of love. The necessity of joy, which is the result of that love, and the love is the keeping of the commandments that he has given to us.

Finally, in the high priestly prayer in John 17, at the end of this, just before they go out and Jesus goes to be betrayed by Judas, he prays for the body. And what does he pray? He prays that they might be one. That they might be united. That as Jesus is in the Father, they might be in him. And they might be united in Jesus—one together and one with him. And through him one with the Father.

Unity again being stressed here in the Gospel accounts of the meal that is held in conjunction with communion.

So based upon Jesus’s example and his teachings, the meal that accompanies communion and leads up to it emphasizes service—putting other people more important than ourselves. It emphasizes, as a result of that, of course, love. It emphasizes unity. It emphasizes joy and the keeping of the commandments.

Now incidental to this, he also talks about charity—not directly, but in another portion of the Gospel accounts. Jesus tells them when breaking bread with the Pharisees on the Sabbath in Luke 14, he says when you have a meal to celebrate, don’t invite your friends. Instead, invite the poor who can’t repay you, and then you’ll be blessed in heaven.

And so in Luke 14, Jesus says when you have a meal, and it was a Sabbath meal he was talking about, you’re to invite the poor into that meal instead of all your friends. And so Jesus, in terms of meals on the Sabbath, also emphasizes the extension of charity.

Okay, that’s the New Testament Gospel account. We see that the New Testament church were correct in looking at the example of Jesus in the meal, stressing unity, love, and joy. That actually taking place in the book of Acts, the warnings against it in Jude, Second Peter 2, and 1 Corinthians 11, and then the new—the historical church of the first couple of centuries following that example. All this is making sense.

But now let’s look back at the Old Testament antecedents of this meal, and we’ll turn first to 2 Chronicles 29 and chapter 30 as well.

Why don’t you turn to 2 Chronicles 29? In 2 Chronicles 29, this is the account of the reforms—the account here is the reforms of Hezekiah during his reign, good king Hezekiah. And he begins to reform things. And in chapter 30, I guess we’ll look at specifically 2 Chronicles 30, he wants to celebrate Passover.

Now, there’s been some historical difficulties here. And in verse 2, we find out that Passover—they actually changed the date of the Passover from the month it was supposed to be celebrated to the second month. Says verse 2, “For the king and the princes and all the assembly in Jerusalem had decided to celebrate the Passover in the second month, since they couldn’t celebrate it at that time because the priests had not consecrated themselves.”

And I point that out because we’re going to look at several things here in this account from 2 Chronicles 30 which gives us a lot of good information about how the regulated principle was followed in Old Testament times.

In the very first thing we find out in terms of the Passover here in 2 Chronicles 30: they changed the date because things weren’t ready, because the historical problems they had at the time here. People weren’t consecrated. Very interesting. Now, we have some New Testament warrant for that, of course, because remember we’ve talked about alternate Sabbath services. There were allowances in the Passover if a man was unclean by reason of a dead body or if he was out of town too far away from the Passover to attend it, they had a date for an alternative Passover.

And so they had some justification for changing the date. And that’s probably part of the reason why they did this, but it wasn’t—they didn’t change it to the date that the law specified. The point is that they had to change the date because of the historical problems existing in the context of. In any event, they were going to celebrate Passover. And in verse 5, a proclamation is made throughout the land that they’re going to have Passover. And this is worship that they’re calling people to do.

And it’s very interesting. We won’t take the time to read through it now, but in verses 6-9, in that proclamation to the people, that the Passover is going to be celebrated in the second month, he warns the people, don’t be stiff-necked and not come to this Passover. Now, I bring that up to show a parallel with the Psalms and then the book of Hebrews.

There’s a warning against resisting the call of God to worship that we’ve talked about. And this is another example of that. And if you’ve understood these principles of the call to worship and the call to worship implying a call to obedience to God, you’ll understand why Hezekiah said, “Don’t be stiff-necked. Don’t walk outside of the covenant. Come to Passover when we celebrate it.”

Okay? Verses 6-9. In verse 12, we have the idea that God prepares the people. I just mentioned that in passing here to reinforce what we said before: that when we prepare ourselves for that Passover in verse 12 of 2 Chronicles 30, there’s an explicit reference to God preparing the hearts of the people to respond to the call to worship again. God’s sovereignty in the issue of the call and the response of the people.

Now, in verses 18-20, we have another very interesting thing happen here in the context of this Passover purification. The rituals have not been observed. Some of these people are still not ready to eat Passover with God according to the law’s requirements of purification. And in verses 18-20, that happens. And what happens then is that Hezekiah prays for them. At the end of verse 18 saying, “May the good Lord pardon everyone who prepares his heart to seek God, the Lord God of his fathers, though not according to the purification rules of the sanctuary.”

So the Lord heard Hezekiah and he healed the people. So here’s a kind of praise—that even though they can’t go through all the formal rites they were supposed to have gone through, please God, accept them anyway. And God says, “Okay.”

God says okay. Hezekiah was going out of his way through the proclamation, through changing the date of Passover. And now through asking God to waive the regulations of purification, as it were, for these people, he is going out of his way to extend grace to those who according to strict observance of all these things wouldn’t have grace with God.

Now, he does this because they’ve demonstrated themselves to be true worshippers of God by coming to the Passover. Their heart is right with God, and he extends grace and compassion to them. In the context of this…