Verse 21
21. Every one Each one. Instead of spreading a table for a common supper, each one made an own supper, of his own food, and preoccupied it entire. Thereby separate sets were established, and what was meant for union became disunion.
Hungry He whom persecution had made poor was left hungry; so that what was meant for liberality became insult.
Drunken At the symposium (which term was compounded of two Greek words, signifying a drink together) even Socrates was said not seldom to have appeared too vinous for a philosopher. The philosopher, therefore, sadly incurred the rebuke of the apostle. Paul, probably, uses as condemnatory a word as truth would allow. It does not necessarily follow from the word, yet it may have been, as Renan says, that some “went reeling from the table of the Lord.” The pagan Corinthians would doubtless consider the apostle as an extremist in temperance. Modern temperance reformers would, perhaps, think that Paul had better go further and prohibit the wine from the agape entirely; but the existence of more fiery liquors, like brandy and whisky, had not suggested the necessity of the law of entire abstinence for all persons from wine. Even now the law of abstinence from wine should be based not upon the intrinsic wickedness of a limited drinking of wine, but upon the obligation to abstain as part of a great reformatory enterprise, and as a prudential safeguard from moral danger. On the word drunken, see note on John 2:10. The antithesis to hungry would suggest that the opposite word would mean surfeited.
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