We have said before that in this meal we are being knit together into the body of Christ, muscle and bone, sinew and tendon, joint and marrow. But too many Christians have reversed the order in this, wanting doctrinal assent or understanding to be the thing that knits us together, so that we may then come to the meal. But this is backwards. Our hearts and minds do not knit us together in the meal; the meal knits our hearts and minds together. Jesus did not say, “take, hold, figure it out.” He said, “take, eat.”
This is why, if you are baptized, a principled willingness to come to this table (even when you have significant differences with others at the same table) is so important. Everyone who comes to this table is objectively enacting a statement of their willingness to change, their willingness to repent, their willingness to agree (in principle) that they might be the problem. They might be the reason there is disagreement or division
Their hearts and minds might be far from this, but the meal still does its knitting work. And because we observe the supper weekly, we are all saying (objectively) that we acknowledge that we might be the problem. This puts tremendous pressure (the right kind of pressure) on those who really are the problem, and draws inexorably them to repentance. Ultimately, there are two options—repent or run. Repentance always looks the way it looks in Scripture, and is characterized by the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, and peace. Running need not be physical—departing the church—although that is frequently done. It could also consist of trying to change the subject through disputing, or checking out in attempted apathy.
But our responses are not the fundamental thing here. We are mostly interested in what God is doing with the fundamental statement of submission that He has assigned to us. And what is He doing? He is building us up into a perfect agreement, in perfect agreement.