REMEMBERED, PROCLAIMED, EXAMINED

Primary Text: 1 Corinthians 11:23–29 (HCSB)

Supporting Texts: Exodus 12:1–14; Luke 22:14–20; 1 Corinthians 5:7–8; Jeremiah 31:31–34; Matthew 27:27–31; John 19:1, 28, 33–34; Isaiah 53:3–5
 

Scripture Reading

1 Corinthians 11:23–29 (HCSB)

23 For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: On the night when He was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread, 24 gave thanks, 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 also took the cup and said, ‘This cup is the new covenant established by My blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.’  26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.

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Self-Examination

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27 Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy way will be guilty of sin against the body and blood of the Lord. 28 So a man should examine himself; in this way he should eat the bread and drink from the cup. 29 For whoever eats and drinks without recognizing the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself.”
 

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Introduction
 

Turn with me to 1 Corinthians 11. I want you to notice how Paul opens this section, because it tells you how seriously we ought to take what we’re about to do at this table. Look at verse 23: “For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you.” That’s not the language of a man describing a custom he picked up along the way. Paul is not describing a tradition he picked up from the other apostles secondhand. That’s the language of a courier delivering a sealed message — something entrusted to him, not invented by him.

That matters, because if there is one thing that happens to sacred things over time, it’s that we get comfortable with them. We come to this table so often — some of us have been coming to a communion table since before we could read — that it stops feeling like what it actually is. It starts to feel like a routine. A pause in the service. A tray passed down the row. And when something sacred becomes routine, the danger isn’t that we’ll do it wrong on the outside. The danger is that we’ll do it right on the outside while something has gone quiet on the inside. Paul wrote this to a church that had let communion become almost unrecognizable — some eating a full meal before the poorer members even arrived, so that “one is hungry and another is drunk.” They had taken the meal meant to unite the body of Christ and used it to expose the divisions inside it. So when Paul says “I received… I passed on,” he’s correcting them: you’ve drifted so far from what this is that I need to take you back to the beginning.
 

Most of us need that same corrective. Not because we’ve made communion a status symbol the way Corinth did, but because familiarity dulls wonder. So this morning I want to walk through what Paul says this meal actually does — not what it symbolizes in some vague, sentimental way, but what it does --three things, every time we observe it.

It looks backward. It looks outward. And it looks inward. It is an act of remembrance, an act of proclamation, and it calls for examination. And before we move from remembrance to proclamation, we’re going to pause and look honestly at what that remembrance actually cost — because “This is My body, which is for you” is not a phrase we should ever say casually.
Let’s take these one at a time.

I. Remembrance — This Meal Looks Backward

Look at verse 24. Jesus took the bread, gave thanks, broke it, and said: “This is My body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.” And in verse 25, after the cup: “Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.” Twice in two verses: in remembrance of Me. Biblical remembrance is never passive nostalgia — as if you were flipping through an old photo album on a quiet afternoon.  Biblical remembrance is the kind of remembering that shapes how you live now because of what God did then.

You see that pattern long before the upper room. In Exodus 12, on the night of the first Passover, God tells Israel to take a lamb, “an unblemished animal, a year-old male” (Exodus 12:5), and put its blood “on the two doorposts and the lintel” (12:7), because “when I see the blood, I will pass over you” (12:13). Then He says, “This day is to be a memorial for you… You are to celebrate it throughout your generations as a permanent statute” (12:14).

A memorial. A permanent statute. God built a remembrance meal into the very fabric of Israel’s identity — not so they would feel nostalgic about the past, but so that every single generation, including the ones who never set foot in Egypt, would know exactly who delivered them and how. The blood on the doorposts wasn’t decoration. It was the only thing standing between that household and judgment. And the Passover meal, eaten every year after, kept that reality alive in the memory of a people who might otherwise have forgotten how desperate their situation had been, and how costly their rescue was.

Now hold that, and turn to Luke 22, the night before the cross. Jesus is eating this same Passover with His disciples, and in the middle of that ancient meal He does something staggering: “He took bread, gave thanks, broke it, gave it to them, and said, ‘This is My body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.’ In the same way He also took the cup after supper and said, ‘This cup is the new covenant established by My blood; it is shed for you’” (Luke 22:19–20). Jesus takes the meal that pointed to a lamb whose blood turned away judgment, and tells His disciples, in effect, I am that lamb. Paul says it plainly elsewhere: “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). Every Passover meal eaten for fourteen centuries had been pointing forward to this moment, to this body, to this blood. And now the shadow meets its substance. The picture becomes the Person.

So, when you hear “in remembrance of Me,” you are not simply recalling a historical fact. You are doing what Israel did every Passover — rehearsing the story of your deliverance so that you never forget how desperate your condition was and how costly your rescue was. Except this time the lamb was the Son of God, without sin, taken to a cross, so that the wrath of God would pass over everyone found in Him. This cannot become routine. When you take that bread, you are holding, in a picture, the body of the Son of God broken for you. When you lift that cup, you are remembering blood that was shed so that judgment would pass over you. This is not a metaphor we’ve grown comfortable with. This is the center of your rescue.

I think of it this way. Every family has objects that carry more weight than their material value would suggest — a wedding ring passed down, a worn Bible with a grandparent’s handwriting in the margins, a photograph kept in a wallet long after the edges have frayed. Nobody looks at those things and thinks, “that’s just paper” or “that’s just metal.” The object has become inseparable from the story it carries. Take away the story, and you’re left with something ordinary. Keep the story attached, and even a plain piece of bread and a cup of the fruit of the vine become the most weighty objects in the room. That is what Jesus did in the upper room — He took the most familiar meal in Israel’s calendar and permanently attached it to Himself, so that His people could never again eat it without remembering exactly what it cost Him.

Remembrance. That’s the first thing this table does. It looks backward.

II. The Cost of the Meal

Before we move on, let’s slow down and look honestly at what “His body, broken for you” and “His blood, shed for you” actually describe.

By the time Jesus reached the cross, His body had already absorbed hours of deliberate, calculated brutality. Matthew chapter 27 tells us that after Pilate’s judgment, “the governor’s soldiers took Jesus into headquarters… They stripped Him and dressed Him in a scarlet military robe. They twisted together a crown of thorns, put it on His head, and placed a reed in His right hand. And they knelt down before Him and mocked Him: ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ Then they spit on Him, took the reed, and kept hitting Him on the head” (Matthew 27:27–30). John tells us plainly what came first: “Pilate took Jesus and had Him flogged” (John 19:1).

That single phrase carries enormous weight. Roman scourging was carried out with a flagrum — leather strips embedded with bone and metal, designed to shred, not just strike. Each strike tore through skin and into the muscle beneath it. The blood loss alone was often severe enough to send a man into hypovolemic shock — a dangerous drop in blood pressure that leaves the body weak and struggling to keep the heart beating efficiently. Add the crown of thorns pressed into a heavily vascular scalp, and it’s no wonder Jesus needed help carrying His crossbeam. Simon of Cyrene wasn’t a sentimental detail — it was medical necessity. The body in front of the soldiers was already failing.​

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​​​​​​​​​​​​​Then came the crucifixion itself. The historical and physiological evidence points to the nails being driven through the wrist rather than the palm, crushing the median nerve and sending burning pain up both arms with every movement. Hanging by nailed wrists and feet, the shoulders would dislocate under the body’s own weight. And that position made breathing itself agonizing: with the chest pulled into an inhaled position, exhaling required pushing up on nailed feet and pulling against nailed wrists — then sagging back down, scraping a torn back against rough wood, over and over, for hours. This slow, exhausting suffocation, compounded by shock and blood loss, is what the doctors who study crucifixion identify as the primary mechanism of death.

Scripture gives us a window into the final stage. Jesus said, “I’m thirsty!” (John 19:28) — the physical cry of a body in advanced shock. And after His death, “one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out” (John 19:34) — a detail consistent with a heart and lungs pushed to catastrophic failure. Whatever the soldier intended by that spear thrust, the physical evidence John recorded points to a body that had already been through more than a human heart is built to survive.

I tell you this not to shock you, but because Isaiah told us seven hundred years earlier exactly why it would happen: “He was pierced because of our transgressions, crushed because of our iniquities; punishment for our peace was on Him, and we are healed by His wounds” (Isaiah 53:5). Every part of what His body absorbed — the flagrum, the thorns, the nails, the dislocated shoulders, the slow suffocation, the failing heart — was not an accident of Roman cruelty that happened to fall on the wrong man. In the purposes of God, it was the payment for what our transgressions actually cost.
 

So when Jesus says, “This is My body, which is for you,” He is not offering a metaphor with soft edges. He is handing you the memorial of a body genuinely, physically torn apart so that yours would not have to be. This is the cost underneath the remembrance — and it tells you plainly that He judged you worth every bit of it.

III. Proclamation — This Meal Looks Outward

Paul continues in verse 26: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.” That word “proclaim” is the language of preaching. Every time the church comes to this table, we are not merely remembering privately — we are preaching, with our hands and this bread and this cup, a message to anyone watching.

This meal is never a private transaction between you and God that everyone else happens to be doing beside you. It is a corporate, public act. Together we declare: the Lord — the eternal Son, God in flesh — has died. And it doesn’t stop with the cross. We proclaim His death “until He comes,” which means this table also looks forward to His return. Jesus Himself said, just before instituting this meal, “I will not eat it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God” (Luke 22:16). Jesus Himself treated this meal as unfinished business.  Every communion service is a rehearsal for that coming feast.
 

This is also why it matters that we come to this table together. The Corinthians corrupted this proclamation by turning the meal into an occasion for division — the wealthy eating well while the poor went hungry. When you fracture fellowship at this table, you corrupt the very sermon it’s supposed to preach, because the gospel it announces is one that reconciles — Jew and Gentile, rich and poor — into one body under one Lord.

Proclamation. That’s the second thing this table does. It looks outward — announcing the cross and the coming kingdom to a watching world, and to each other.

IV. Examination — This Meal Looks Inward

Now we come to the part of this passage that should sober us. Look at verses 27–29: “Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy way will be guilty of sin against the body and blood of the Lord. So a man should examine himself… For whoever eats and drinks without recognizing the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself.”

This passage has too often been used to keep tender, repentant people away from the table — exactly the people it was set for. So let’s be precise. Paul is not demanding moral perfection before you eat; if that were the standard, none of us could ever come. What he’s addressing is carelessness — the Corinthians were treating this holy meal thoughtlessly, some getting drunk on the communion wine while others went hungry, sinning “against the body and blood of the Lord” by treating something sacred as common. They were treating the body and blood of the Lord as though it were just another potluck, and in doing so, they were sinning “against the body and blood of the Lord”

So “examine himself” means: be honest. Am I coming in genuine faith? Is there sin I’m nursing rather than confessing? Is there a relationship I’m refusing to reconcile, even as I share this meal? Is there a brother or sister I have wronged, or who has wronged me, that I am refusing to be reconciled to, even as I claim to share this meal with them? Am I taking this bread and this cup thoughtlessly, the way the Corinthians did, without any recognition of what — of who — this represents?  This is why churches pause before serving communion — not as formality, but as Paul’s own instruction. The warning is serious; some in Corinth grew sick, and some died, over how carelessly they treated this meal.

But hear this just as clearly: this examination is never meant to keep the repentant away. It’s meant to keep the careless from treating grace cheaply — from wandering into something sacred with no thought at all about what it means. If your self-examination turns up sin this morning — and it will — the answer isn’t to fold your arms and stay in your seat. None of us is worthy; that was never the qualification. The qualification is faith — trusting that the body and blood this table represents is sufficient to cover exactly what your examination uncovered. Confess it now, and come. This table was never for the person who has it all together. It was set for those who know they don’t.

Examination, then, is the third thing this table does — not to disqualify you, but to prepare you.

V. The Meal of the New Covenant

These three threads aren’t separate things happening at this table — they’re one meal doing three things at once. Jesus called the cup “the new covenant established by My blood” (1 Corinthians 11:25), reaching back to God’s promise through Jeremiah: “I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel… I will put My teaching within them and write it on their hearts… For I will forgive their wrongdoing and never again remember their sin” (Jeremiah 31:31, 33–34).

That is the promise Jesus fulfilled in the upper room, and the promise renewed at this table every time we gather. When you remember here, you’re remembering the cost of that covenant. When you proclaim here, you’re announcing it’s sealed and the King is coming to complete it. And when you examine yourself here, you’re making sure you’re actually walking in it — trusting the Mediator, resting in the forgiveness He purchased.

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Invitation to the Table

So here is where we land. In a few moments we will do what the church has done since that first upper room — take the bread, take the cup, in remembrance of Him.
 

Before we do, take this moment Paul gives us. Is there sin to confess? Confess it now, and know the blood we’re about to remember is sufficient to cover it. Is there a relationship that needs reconciling? Let the Spirit press on that. Is there doubt? Bring it honestly — this table has always been for those who come with whatever faith they have.

But don’t let examination turn into hesitation that keeps you away. This meal was never set for the flawless. It was set for those rescued by a Passover Lamb, sealed into a covenant they didn’t earn, given a seat at a family meal they didn’t deserve — by grace, through the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

So come. Remember what He did. Proclaim it together to a watching world. And examine your heart honestly — not to stay away, but so that when you take this bread and this cup, you take it the way it was always meant to be taken.

Let’s pray, and then come to the table together.

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