1 Corinthians 11

Today’s Passage: 1 Corinthians 11

This chapter takes us inside the room where the Corinthians actually gathered, and it takes up two things that were going wrong there. The first half concerns what men and women did with their heads when they prayed and prophesied in the assembly. Paul begins not with cloth or hair but with a chain of relationships: the head of every man is Christ, the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. From that he reasons down to the customs of covering and uncovering that carried honor or shame in a Greek city, and he grounds it all in the way God made humanity in the beginning, in a hard verse about angels that no one has ever fully explained, and in a beautiful balancing word that keeps the whole thing from being twisted: in the Lord, neither one is independent of the other, and everything comes from God. Then at verse seventeen the tone changes. Paul turns to the Lord’s Supper, and for the first time in the letter he says outright that he has no praise to offer. Their gatherings were doing more harm than good, because the well-off were eating and drinking their fill while the poor sat there with nothing. So Paul hands back to them the words he had received from the Lord Himself, the bread, the cup, the new covenant in His blood, and he tells them what that Table is: a proclamation of the Lord’s death until He comes. The chapter closes with a call to examine ourselves, a sober word about the Lord’s discipline, and one very plain instruction: wait for one another.

As you read, hold this: The order God wove into His people and the Table where His Son is remembered are guarded the same way, by looking away from ourselves to the body that was given for us.

1 Corinthians 11:1–3 (BSB)

¹ You are to imitate me, just as I imitate Christ. ² Now I commend you for remembering me in everything and for maintaining the traditions, just as I passed them on to you. ³ But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.

Notice how gently he opens. Paul has just spent three chapters teaching them to lay down their rights for the sake of others, and he seals it with himself as the example, though he is careful to add the words that keep it from vanity: “just as I imitate Christ.” He is not asking them to follow a personality. He is asking them to follow a man who is himself following Someone else, and the moment Paul stops following Christ, the imitation stops too. Then he does something we should learn from. Before he corrects them, he commends them. They had held on to what he taught. Whatever else was wrong in Corinth, they had not thrown away the deposit, and Paul says so warmly before he says anything hard. Then comes the verse that governs the whole first half of the chapter, and it is worth reading slowly, because Paul does not start where we expect. He does not start with women, or with cloth, or with custom. He starts at the top, with God and Christ, and works down. Three times he uses the word head (κεφαλή) kephalē, pronounced kef-al-AY. Strong's G2776, head. The Greek word is the ordinary word for the head on your shoulders, and the New Testament uses it that way often enough, of the head John the Baptist lost and the head Jesus had nowhere to lay. But it also carries a second sense, the top or the chief thing, the way we still speak of the head of a river or the head of a household. Scripture calls Christ the kephalē of the church, His body, and the head of every ruler and authority, and it takes the stone the builders rejected and calls it the head of the corner. Some scholars press hard for the meaning “source” or “origin” here rather than “authority,” and there is something to it, since Paul immediately talks about woman coming from man in the beginning; others hold firmly to the sense of headship and order, which is how the church has read it for most of its history. The honest thing to say is that both ideas are present in the passage itself, source in verses eight and twelve, order in verses three and ten, and Paul does not seem interested in choosing between them. What he will not permit is the conclusion our proud hearts leap to, that being under a head makes you small. He blocks that door with the Father and the Son. There is no inequality of worth anywhere in that sentence, and there must be none in ours. , and the third use is the one that should settle our hearts about the other two: “the head of Christ is God.” Whatever this word means, it cannot possibly mean that the one under the head is worth less, or is a lesser being, or matters less to God. Say that of the Son and you have unsaid the Christian faith. The Son is fully and eternally God, equal in every glory, and yet within the saving work He gladly takes the place of the One who is sent.

Hold that last thought against the great hymn Paul sings elsewhere about the mind of Christ, and you will see how far the New Testament is from confusing order with worth.

"Who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in human likeness." Philippians 2:6–7 (BSB)

Equality with God, fully possessed, and yet not clutched. That is the pattern set at the head of the chain, and everything below it is meant to look like that.

1 Corinthians 11:4–6 (BSB)

⁴ Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head. ⁵ And every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, for it is just as if her head were shaved. ⁶ If a woman does not cover her head, she should have her hair cut off. And if it is shameful for a woman to have her hair cut or shaved off, she should cover her head.

Now Paul comes down from heaven’s order to a Corinthian living room, and he applies it in the language that city understood. A man covering his head as he prayed was borrowing the posture of Roman civic religion, draping himself in the dignity of his own standing at the very moment he was supposed to be bowing before Christ. A woman uncovering her head was reaching for the look of the frenzied cults or of a woman with no husband’s honor to guard, and in that culture she might as well have shaved her head in the street. Paul’s reasoning turns on shame, and he assumes his readers feel it: if you would be ashamed to walk out the door with your head shorn, then do not do the equivalent thing in the assembly.

But before we go one step further, stop and see what verse five hands us, because a great deal of unnecessary sorrow has come from missing it. Paul writes of “every woman who prays or prophesies.” He is not scolding women for opening their mouths. He assumes they are praying aloud and prophesying in that gathering, and he does not lift a finger to stop them; his whole concern is how they do it. Whatever this passage is teaching about order, it is emphatically not teaching that a woman must sit silent and unused in the body of Christ. God gives His gifts to sons and daughters alike, and He gives them to be used. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost fell on the maidservants as truly as on the men, and the New Testament is full of women praying, prophesying, teaching in their homes, laboring in the gospel, carrying letters, holding churches together. Manna Praxis holds, with the historic church, that the teaching office over the gathered congregation follows the pattern Scripture lays down in the pastoral letters. That is a narrow thing. It is not a lid on a woman’s gifts, and anyone who uses these verses as a lid has misused them.

1 Corinthians 11:7–9 (BSB)

⁷ A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man. ⁸ For man did not come from woman, but woman from man. ⁹ Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.

Here Paul reaches back past every custom in Corinth to the garden. Read verse seven carefully, because it is easy to hear it wrongly. Paul does not say that the man is the image of God and the woman is not. Genesis had settled that on page one: God created mankind in His own image, male and female He created them, and the woman bears that image as fully as the man does. What Paul is tracing is the line of derivation in the creation account, and glory is the word he uses for it. The man was formed first, straight from the dust, and the woman was formed from him and brought to him, so that in the order of the story she comes forth as his glory, the crown and completion of a creation that God had until then called not good.

"And from the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man, He made a woman and brought her to him." Genesis 2:22 (BSB)

Sit with that picture for a moment before drawing any conclusions from it. She is not scraped up out of the mud as an afterthought. She is taken from his very side and carried to him by God Himself, the first gift ever given at a wedding, and the man’s response is a burst of poetry, the first human words in Scripture that sing. That is what Paul means by glory. To be someone’s glory is not to be beneath them; it is to be the thing that makes them shine. And when he adds that woman was created for man, he is thinking of that lonely line in Genesis where God says it is not good for the man to be alone, and He makes for him a helper suitable to him, a word Scripture elsewhere uses of God Himself as the helper of Israel. There is nothing demeaning in it anywhere.

1 Corinthians 11:10 (BSB)

¹⁰ For this reason a woman ought to have a sign of authority on her head, because of the angels.

And now we come to the hardest half-line in the chapter, and the honest thing is to admit it. “Because of the angels” is one of those places where good and reverent scholars have differed for eighteen centuries, and none of the explanations has ever won the field. Some understand it of the holy angels as watchers of worship, present when the church gathers, so that what is done in the assembly is done before an unseen congregation and disorder there is not a private matter. Others connect it to the created order the angels observe with wonder, since Peter says they long to look into these things, and to the Ephesian word that God’s manifold wisdom is being displayed through the church to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms. Others take it as a warning drawn from the ancient story of angelic beings who did not keep their proper domain, so that the covering marks out a woman as being under her rightful order and not exposed. Still others read the Greek word for messenger in its plain, ordinary sense and think of human observers, visitors from outside who would read an uncovered head as scandalous.

You may weigh those as you like. What none of us may do is pretend to a certainty God has not given, or build a heavy doctrine on a phrase whose meaning He left in shadow. Scripture is clear where it needs to be clear, and here it simply is not. What is plain in the verse is the rest of it: a woman is to have on her head a sign of the authority under which she gladly stands, and Paul says she ought to have it, as something belonging to her, not something forced on her. Be content with what is given, and let the shadow stay a shadow. There will be time enough to understand it, and Someone who can explain it perfectly.

1 Corinthians 11:11–12 (BSB)

¹¹ In the Lord, however, woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. ¹² For just as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God.

If ever you feared this passage was tilting toward contempt, hear the Spirit swing the door open. “In the Lord, however.” That little word turns the whole argument on its hinge and floods it with light. Yes, the first woman came from the man. But look around you: every man since Adam has come from a woman, carried in her body, nursed at her breast, taught to speak at her knee, and that includes the Lord Jesus Himself, who was born of a woman and honored her from the cross. Neither one can stand alone. Neither one can look at the other and say, I do not need you. In Christ they are bound together, and Paul strips away every possible ground for boasting on either side with one final clause that lands like the closing note of a hymn: “But everything comes from God.” Man, woman, order, glory, birth, life, all of it comes down out of the hand of the same generous God, and no one in that room had anything He had not given them. Praise Him for a wisdom that puts us in our places and then, in the same breath, ties us to one another and refuses to let either of us think we are the source of anything. That is not a grudging concession tucked into the argument. That is the heart of it.

1 Corinthians 11:13–16 (BSB)

¹³ Judge for yourselves: Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered? ¹⁴ Doesn’t nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, ¹⁵ but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For long hair is given to her as a covering. ¹⁶ If anyone is inclined to dispute this, we have no other practice, nor do the churches of God.

Paul finishes the argument with an appeal to their own good sense, to what nature itself was teaching them, and finally to the settled practice of all the churches. And here we must say something carefully, because Christians who love the Bible have long read this ending in different ways. Some hold that the covering commanded here is binding on the church in every age and wear it faithfully, and they should not be sneered at for taking Scripture seriously. Others hold that the covering was the visible language of that world for a truth that is not itself a matter of that world, the way a handshake or a bowed head means something in one culture and nothing in another. That second reading has strong support in the passage, since Paul himself grounds his appeal in what “nature” teaches and in the custom of the churches, and since verse fifteen says the woman’s own hair has been given to her as a covering.

What matters is not to lose the baby with the bathwater. The particular sign belonged to first-century Corinth. The thing it signified did not. God has woven an order into His people, and He asks that it be honored visibly, in whatever way a given time and place can actually read. Behind that lies something deeper still, the truth Paul opened with: that Christ Himself, equal with the Father, took a place under the Father’s sending and called it His joy. A church that has understood that will not fight over who gets to be highest, because it has seen the highest One go lowest. And notice how Paul ends, not by hammering the point but by declining to quarrel about it. He states the practice of the churches and lays down his pen. Some things are worth insisting on. Not everything is worth arguing about.

1 Corinthians 11:17–19 (BSB)

¹⁷ In the following instructions I have no praise to offer, because your gatherings do more harm than good. ¹⁸ First of all, I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and in part I believe it. ¹⁹ And indeed, there must be differences among you to show which of you are approved.

The tone changes now, and you can feel it. Back at verse two he commended them; here he says flatly that he has no praise to offer. Let those words land, because they are terrible words: their gatherings were doing more harm than good. It is possible for a church to meet faithfully every week, sing, pray, hear the Word, share the Table, and come away worse than it went in. Paul is not saying they had stopped assembling. He is saying that the assembling itself had become the occasion of the damage. The problem is named at once: divisions. The word he uses is the picture of a tear in a garment, the same word for the rip in an old cloak, and it is the same trouble he had confronted back in chapter one, only now it has walked out of the realm of opinion and sat down at the dinner table. Verse nineteen is a sober word. Paul does not welcome the factions, but he sees God’s hand even in them, for pressure has a way of showing what a thing is really made of, and when a church is shaken, those who are genuine become visible. God is never merely watching the damage. He is working through it, sifting, exposing, and proving His own.

1 Corinthians 11:20–22 (BSB)

²⁰ Now then, when you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat. ²¹ For as you eat, each of you goes ahead without sharing his meal. While one remains hungry, another gets drunk. ²² Don’t you have your own homes in which to eat and drink? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What can I say to you? Shall I praise you for this? No, I will not!

Here is the scene, and it is an ugly one. The believers who had leisure and full baskets arrived early, took their places in the dining room, and began. By the time the poor came in from a day’s labor, the food was gone and some of the early arrivals were drunk. And Paul’s verdict is devastating in its simplicity: whatever you are eating, “it is not the Lord’s Supper.” The bread may have been on the table. The words may have been said. But a meal that shames the poor is not the Lord’s Supper, because the Lord of that Supper gave His body for the very people being left hungry in the courtyard. You cannot proclaim a Savior who emptied Himself while you are filling yourself in front of His poor. Then comes the question that ought to make every one of us go quiet: “Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?” They would have been horrified at the charge. They were not plotting to despise anyone; they were simply doing what Corinth always did at dinner. That is exactly how contempt gets into a congregation, not by decision but by habit, by carrying the world’s rankings through the door without ever noticing we have done it. Ask what the world’s ordinary way of sorting people looks like in your own day, and whether it has quietly taken a seat among God’s people, because the ones it seats last are the ones for whom Christ died.

1 Corinthians 11:23–25 (BSB)

²³ For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night He was betrayed, took bread, ²⁴ and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, “This is My body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of Me.” ²⁵ In the same way, after supper He took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.”

Paul’s remedy for their disorder is not a new rule. It is the story. He simply tells them again what happened on a certain night, and lets the weight of it do the work. These are the oldest written words of the institution we possess, set down before any of the Gospels were finished, and Paul says he did not invent them; he received them and passed them on (παραδίδωμι) paradidōmi, pronounced pah-rah-DID-oh-mee. Strong's G3860, to hand over, deliver up, pass on a tradition. The verb means to hand over, to deliver something into another’s keeping, and it is the ordinary word for passing along a tradition from one generation to the next. That is how Paul uses it in verse two and again in verse twenty-three: he received, and he handed on, and now they must hand on too. But look where else this verb turns up in the same sentence, because it is the very word behind “on the night He was betrayed.” Jesus was paradidōmi, handed over. Judas handed Him over to the priests; the priests handed Him over to Pilate; Pilate handed Him over to be crucified. The same word carries the treachery of a friend and the trust of a sacred deposit, and Scripture pushes it one step further still and says that God did not spare His own Son but delivered Him up for us all, and that He was delivered over for our trespasses and raised for our justification. Behind the betrayer’s hands were the Father’s hands. Nothing was slipping out of control that night. The Son was being handed over, and He was handing over to His church, in the same hour, the memorial of what it would cost Him. . Then note the four things Jesus did, the four things the church has done ever since: He took bread, He gave thanks, He broke it, He gave it. And note when He did them. “On the night He was betrayed.” Of all the nights, that one. He was hours from Gethsemane, from the kiss in the torchlight, from the courtyard and the scourging and the nails, and what He was doing with those hours was making provision for His friends to remember Him. He gave thanks. On that night, He gave thanks.

And what He asks of us is astonishingly modest. Not that we should re-enact His sacrifice, for that was finished once for all. Not that we should earn anything at this Table, for it is not a means of purchase but a means of nourishment. He asks that we do this in remembrance (ἀνάμνησις) anamnēsis, pronounced ah-NAM-nay-sis. Strong's G364, a calling to mind, a memorial remembrance. The Greek word means a calling to mind, a bringing back up before the eyes, and it is far more muscular than what we usually mean by remembering. In the Greek Old Testament it labels the memorial portion of an offering, the handful of grain burned so that the whole gift comes up before God. At Passover the father of the house did not merely recall the exodus as an old story; he told it in the present tense, so that the children at the table counted themselves among those brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand. That is the flavor of anamnēsis. When the Lord says “do this in remembrance of Me,” He is not asking for a moment of nostalgia about a good man who died long ago. He is putting into our hands a sign that carries us to the cross and carries the cross to us, until the thing that happened outside a city wall two thousand years ago is the most present fact in the room. The bread in your hand was broken by someone else’s hands. The cup was filled before you came. Everything about the Table says that the work was done for you and given to you, and all that is left is to receive it and to remember Whose it is. of Him. The bread is broken so that our slow hearts will see His body given; the cup is poured so that we will taste, in a way that mere hearing cannot reach, that there is a new covenant sealed in blood, the covenant Jeremiah promised long before, in which God writes His law on the heart and remembers our sins no more. This is a memorial and a proclamation, and it truly feeds faith, but no one has ever been saved by eating it. We are saved by the One it points to.

1 Corinthians 11:26 (BSB)

²⁶ For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.

One verse, and it holds the whole meaning of the Table between two horizons. Look back first: every time the bread is broken, a sermon is preached without a word being said. The church proclaims the Lord’s death, not His teaching, not His example, not His miracles, but His death, the one thing the ancient world thought was His disgrace and the one thing Paul refused to stop talking about. A congregation may have a poor preacher, but if it keeps this Table it cannot stop announcing the crucified Christ. Now look forward: “until He comes.” The Supper has a date on it. It is not a permanent institution but a temporary one, given for the in-between time, for the stretch of road we are walking now, and one day it will simply stop, because the One we remember will be standing in the room. There is comfort in that for anyone who has ever taken the bread with a heavy heart. This is not the last meal. It is provision for the journey, and the journey has an end.

1 Corinthians 11:27–29 (BSB)

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 Each one must examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup. ²⁹ For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.

Few verses have been more misread than these, and the misreading has kept tender souls away from the Table for years, so let us be plain. Paul does not say that an unworthy person must not eat. If he did, no one would ever eat again, for there has never been a worthy communicant in the history of the church. He speaks of eating in an unworthy manner, and the manner is the one he has been describing since verse seventeen: shoving ahead of the hungry, drinking too much, treating the Lord’s Table like a private dinner party and His poor like servants at the door. That is what makes a person guilty here. Then he tells each one to examine himself (δοκιμάζω) dokimazō, pronounced dok-ee-MAHD-zo. Strong's G1381, to test, examine, prove genuine. This is the word for assaying metal, holding gold or silver to the fire to find out whether it is genuine and, when it proves genuine, stamping it as approved. Both halves of the meaning matter. To dokimazō something is to test it, and also to give it your approval once it has passed. The related adjective appears back in verse nineteen, where those who are “approved” become visible under pressure, and the same verb is used when Paul tells the Romans to test and approve the good and perfect will of God, and when he tells the Corinthians in his next letter to examine themselves to see whether they are in the faith. Hear the aim of it. This is not a morbid rummaging through your own heart to see whether you are wretched enough to be turned away. It is the assayer’s fire, whose purpose is to find the gold and declare it good. Come to the Table, then, and come honestly. Name what needs naming, ask the Lord to search you, and hold nothing back from Him. But do not confuse self-examination with self-condemnation, and do not stay away from the Table because you know you are not worthy of it. Everyone at that Table is unworthy. That is precisely why there is a Table at all. , and note the object of that examining: himself, not his neighbor. The Corinthians were expert at looking sideways. Paul turns the light around.

"Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my concerns. See if there is any offensive way in me; lead me in the way everlasting." Psalm 139:23–24 (BSB)

That is the prayer of a man who is not afraid of the searching, because he knows the Searcher. And when Paul warns about eating “without recognizing the body,” remember what body has been at issue all through this chapter. He means the Lord’s body given for us, certainly. But he also means the body sitting in that courtyard with nothing to eat, the church of God, the members for whom Christ died. To fail to see them is to fail to see Him.

1 Corinthians 11:30–32 (BSB)

³⁰ That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep. ³¹ Now if we judged ourselves properly, we would not come under judgment. ³² But when we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be condemned with the world.

Here is a sobering word, and Paul states it as a matter of fact rather than as a threat. Sickness had come among them, and some had died, and he traces it to the way they were treating the Lord’s Table and the Lord’s people. We must be careful here. Scripture never allows us to look at another person’s illness and conclude that it is punishment; Job’s friends tried that and God rebuked them for it, and the Lord Jesus flatly refused it in the case of the man born blind. Paul is speaking by apostolic knowledge about a specific congregation and a specific sin. What we may take from it is not a diagnosis for our neighbors but a warning for ourselves, that God takes His Table seriously and that He will not let His children go on unchecked in something that is destroying them.

And then, having said the hard thing, Paul gives us one of the most comforting sentences in the letter. When the Lord judges His own, “we are being disciplined so that we will not be condemned with the world.” Read that twice. The chastening is not the opening of a case against them; it is the proof that the case will never be opened, that they belong to Him, and that He would rather wound them now than lose them forever. He disciplines the ones He loves, and He chastises every son He receives. There is a world of difference between the rod in a father’s hand and the sentence of a judge, and this verse draws that line with perfect clarity. His severity here is the guarantee of His mercy hereafter. Give thanks for a God who loves His children too much to leave them alone.

1 Corinthians 11:33–34 (BSB)

³³ So, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. ³⁴ If anyone is hungry, he should eat at home, so that when you come together it will not result in judgment. And when I come, I will give instructions about the remaining matters.

After all that height and all that weight, look at where Paul lands: “wait for one another.” That is the whole remedy, and a child could carry it out. He does not hand them a new liturgy or a set of regulations. He tells them to sit on their hands until the last person has come in from work, and if they truly cannot wait because they are hungry, to eat something at home first so that the gathering is not about their stomachs. It is such a small, ordinary, practical instruction, and it is exactly right, because love in the church almost always comes down to something that small. Waiting is a way of saying that the person not yet in the room matters as much as I do. It is the visible shape of a body that will not begin without its own members. And there is something fitting in the fact that the letter which climbs to the heights of resurrection glory also stops to tell people to hold off on dinner. The gospel is never too grand for the kitchen.