At the first Supper, the Lord delivered a new commandment to His disciples – which was that they were love one another the same way He has loved them. He said further that this would be the mark by which they would be identified as His, by their love for one another, a love that was the same as His love.
A central place where this love is to be declared, proclaimed, acted out, chewed and swallowed is in the Lord’s Supper. That is the context. But we are still slow of heart to believe, and this shows up, not surprisingly, in how we observe the Supper. The apostle Paul spends virtually the entire book of 1 Corinthians chastising them for their cultivation of divisions which despised the weaker members of the congregation – and we take him to be requiring us to withhold the Supper from the weaker members of the congregation. He commands us to examine ourselves, and we take him to mean that we are to examine other people.
We use our lack of knowledge of hearts as a firm foundation for rejecting others. Christ, in His full knowledge of hearts, received and accepted the weak and lowly. To whom did He administer the Supper? We have already considered Judas. But He gave also to Peter, who boasted vainly about his dedication. He gave to the other disciples, who within hours scattered like sheep in a thunderstorm. He gave to men who took the solemn occasion to have a quarrel about who was the greatest.
Jesus said, as I have loved you, so love one another. No one in this room has offended any other person here the way the disciples offended Christ. And yet, unspeakable kindness, He fed them anyway. So come, and eat together.