Movement D: Practical Ordering (vv. 33-34)

The Verses

33 Wherefore, my brethren, when ye come together to eat, tarry one for another. 34 And if any man hunger, let him eat at home; that ye come not together unto condemnation. And the rest will I set in order when I come.

— 1 Corinthians 11:33-34 (KJV)

What Paul Is Doing

After three movements of diagnosis, story-telling, and pastoral warning, Paul lands the passage with practical instruction. The remedy is concrete, not abstract. He does not say “love one another more”; he says “wait for one another.” He does not say “honor the poor”; he says “if you are hungry, eat at home first so that the gathering is not your private meal.” The principles of Movements A-C are translated into two simple behaviors plus an open-ended deferral of the rest to a later visit.

Three topics open here: what “tarry one for another” actually means, what “eat at home” implies about the structure of the gathered meal, and the open question of “the rest will I set in order when I come” — including what Paul does not say and what the post-apostolic church did with the silence.

Topic D1 — “Tarry One for Another” (v. 33, ἐκδέχεσθε)

“Wherefore, my brethren, when ye come together to eat, tarry one for another.” (v. 33, KJV)

The verb is ἐκδέχεσθε — present middle imperative of ekdechomai. The semantic range matters because the translations divide on it.

The translation question

Translation	Rendering
KJV	”tarry one for another”
ESV	”wait for one another”
NASB	”wait for one another”
NIV	”you should all eat together”
NRSV	”wait for one another”
RSV	”wait for one another”

The verb has two well-attested senses in Hellenistic Greek:

“Wait for, await” — the temporal sense. Wait until the others arrive before beginning.
“Receive, welcome” — the hospitable sense. Welcome one another at the meal.

Most modern translations and commentators favor sense 1: wait for one another. The reading fits Movement A’s diagnosis (the well-off arrive first and eat while the poor are still working) and gives the most natural correction (wait until they get here). The NIV’s “eat together” tries to capture the practical upshot.

A minority of careful readers (Lampe; some patristic readers) favor sense 2: welcome / receive one another. On this reading, Paul’s correction is not (only) “wait for them” but “welcome them as honored members of the same body when they arrive.” The ecclesial overtone fits Movement C’s “discerning the body.”

The two readings are not opposed. The practical action is similar in both cases (don’t start without them, treat them as honored when they come). The undertone differs: sense 1 emphasizes patience; sense 2 emphasizes welcome.

What the correction actually requires

Movement A established that the Corinthian abuse was Greco-Roman host-guest stratification reproduced at the Lord’s Table. The “tarry” correction reverses the stratification in three concrete ways:

The meal’s timing waits for the latecomer rather than starting at the host’s convenience. This is socially costly to the host — the timing of a Greco-Roman dinner was a marker of host privilege.
No one’s hunger gets satisfied before everyone’s hunger gets attended to. This is the social-equalizing move that Greco-Roman dining specifically did not make.
The “first triclinium / second triclinium” tiering disappears. If everyone is together, there is no inner-circle table.

Paul does not in this verse explicitly forbid stratified seating; he forbids stratified timing. But the timing constraint dissolves much of the seating stratification by itself. If the meal is one meal that waits for everyone, then it is not the host’s private dinner with a public extension.

A note on the present tense

The verb is a present imperative — “be in the habit of waiting.” Paul is not naming a one-time correction; he is naming a settled pattern. The Corinthian Supper had become a habituated pattern of not-waiting; the apostolic instruction is a habituated pattern of waiting. Movement A’s σχίσματα were not events but practices; Movement D’s ekdechesthe is also a practice — the practice that replaces them.

Topic D2 — “Eat at Home” (v. 34a)

“And if any man hunger, let him eat at home; that ye come not together unto condemnation.” (v. 34a, KJV)

This is the line that most surprises modern readers. Having just told the Corinthians to wait for one another because the poor are going hungry, Paul now seems to say if you are hungry, eat at home. The two instructions appear in tension.

Resolving the surface tension

The tension is resolved by attending to who the “hungry man” is. Paul has spent the passage condemning the wealthy who ate without waiting (Movement A); v. 34a addresses that same person. The instruction is: if your hunger is the kind that cannot wait, satisfy it at home before you come — do not let your private hunger drive the timing of the gathered meal.

This is not a permission to skip the Lord’s Supper. It is a correction of the wealthy person whose impatience was hurting the body. Take care of your private appetite at home; come to the gathering to attend to a different kind of hunger.

There is also a structural move embedded in the instruction. By saying “if you are hungry, eat at home,” Paul is implicitly separating the function of “meal that satisfies appetite” from the function of “meal that is the Lord’s Supper.” The Corinthian abuse fused them in a way that allowed the satisfying-appetite function to colonize the Lord’s Supper function. The “eat at home” line opens the structural space the post-apostolic church will use to separate the two — first into the agape (love-feast) and the eucharist, eventually into two completely different events.

What this does not mean

It is sometimes read as Paul deprecating the meal aspect of the Supper — “the real Supper is the bread and cup; the food is incidental, eat that at home.” This is anachronistic. The Corinthian Supper was a real meal (see Historical Context). Paul is not saying the meal is unimportant; he is correcting how the meal was being eaten. The “eat at home” instruction is a corrective to the abuse, not a statement about the nature of the gathered meal.

What does emerge, however, is a principle that the post-apostolic church will develop: the gathered meal of the church is not a substitute for ordinary meals, and ordinary appetites should not drive the gathered meal’s shape. That principle is in seed form here.

”That ye come not together unto condemnation”

The closing clause picks up the krima / katakrima language of Movement C. The Corinthians’ gathering had been bringing them into condemnation; the practical instructions of vv. 33-34 are the way out. The pastoral aim is clear: Paul is not driving them away from the Table; he is telling them how to come back to it without harm.

Topic D3 — “The Rest Will I Set in Order When I Come” (v. 34b)

“And the rest will I set in order when I come.” (v. 34b, KJV)

The final clause is one of the most consequential lines in Paul’s Corinthian correspondence. The Greek is τὰ δὲ λοιπὰ ὡς ἂν ἔλθω διατάξομαι — “and the remaining things, when I come, I will set in order.” Diatassō is the verb for authoritative ordering — used for military commands, royal decrees, ecclesial regulation. Paul is naming what he has not yet addressed and reserving his authority over it for a future visit.

What is not in our text

This single line tells us that what we have in 11:17-34 is not a complete liturgical regulation of the Lord’s Supper. Paul has addressed:

The diagnosis of the Corinthian abuse (A)
The dominical institution that re-frames what the meal is (B)
The pastoral warning and remedy (C)
Two practical correctives — wait, and eat at home (D)

He has not addressed (or has addressed only by implication):

The frequency of celebration
The exact ordering of bread and cup within a meal
Who presides, and what authority that requires
The form of prayer over the elements
The role of the agape meal alongside the eucharist
Communion of those outside the gathered body (the sick, the imprisoned)
Eucharistic discipline (when to fence the Table, when to admit, when to exclude)

These were the subjects of intense interest in the post-apostolic church. They are present in the Didache (c. 50-110), Justin Martyr’s First Apology (c. 150), Hippolytus’s Apostolic Tradition (c. 215), and the developing liturgical orders of the 3rd-4th centuries. They were not settled in the New Testament. Paul names this directly: the rest, I will set in order when I come.

What the post-apostolic church did with the silence

Three observations about how the early church filled the space Paul left open:

1. The agape / eucharist separation. By the time of Justin Martyr (c. 150), the eucharistic celebration is a discrete liturgical event, no longer embedded in a full meal. The agape (love-feast) continues as a separate event in some places (Tertullian Apol. 39 describes it as a charitable meal still distinct from the eucharist). The fusion that the Corinthian Supper assumed had separated by the mid-second century. This separation may be the most concrete example of “setting the rest in order” — the post-apostolic church resolved the structural problem that Movement A diagnosed by separating the appetite-meal from the eucharist.

2. The Didache prayers. The Didache (chs. 9-10) preserves a set of eucharistic prayers — over the cup, over the broken bread, and after eating — that show an established liturgical pattern well before the Pauline congregation would have known a worked-out form. These prayers do not depend on 1 Cor 11; they sit alongside it as evidence of how the early Pauline-era and post-Pauline-era churches actually prayed at the Table.

3. The role of the bishop and the regulation of the Table. By Ignatius (c. 110), the eucharist requires the bishop’s presence or his delegate: “Let that be considered a valid eucharist which is celebrated by the bishop, or by one whom he appoints” (Smyrn. 8). This is a development not warranted directly from 1 Cor 11 but is the kind of “setting in order” the post-apostolic church undertook. It addressed concrete questions Paul did not address — who presides, who admits.

The Christian traditions have disagreed about how much weight to give these post-apostolic developments. The Catholic and Orthodox traditions read them as legitimate further apostolic-era ordering. The Reformation traditions read them with more caution — accepting some developments (separate liturgical Supper, congregational prayer) while questioning others (sacerdotal priesthood, ex opere operato sacramental theology). All sides recognize that something had to be set in order; they disagree on what counts as faithful ordering.

What this means for present practice

Paul’s “the rest I will set in order when I come” has two pastoral consequences for the present church.

First, not everything we do at the Table is in 1 Cor 11. The form of prayer, the frequency, the presider, the relationship to a full meal — these were developed by the church in light of apostolic authority but were not, in 1 Cor 11, dictated by Paul. The text is not silent on every question.

Second, the boundary of what was apostolic is also not in 1 Cor 11. The text marks its own incompleteness and points to “when I come” — but what Paul said when he came (assuming he came; cf. Acts 20, 2 Cor 13) we do not have. The first-century church preserved his institution words and his pastoral correction; it did not preserve his full taxis (ordering). The traditions developed it.

This is not a failure of the text. It is the text’s own self-presentation. Paul wrote enough for the Corinthian crisis; he reserved the rest for later. The church has had to fill the gap, and has done so variously. The variety is not surprising; the text invited it.

Reading Movement D — and Reading the Whole

Movement D closes the passage with the same pastoral sobriety with which it opened in Movement A — but the sobriety is now constructive, not diagnostic. The Corinthians have been told what is wrong, what the meal is, what the consequence of misuse looks like, and now what to do: wait, satisfy private hunger at home, and trust that further questions will be addressed in due course.

The whole passage holds together as a unit:

Movement	What Paul does	What the church gets
A (vv. 17-22)	Diagnose the abuse: class division at the Table	A warning that the manner of gathering can negate the meal
B (vv. 23-26)	Re-tell the institution story	A meal that is body broken for you, new covenant in his blood, proclamation till he comes
C (vv. 27-32)	Name the consequence and prescribe the remedy	Self-examination, discernment of the body, paideia not condemnation
D (vv. 33-34)	Give practical correctives and reserve the rest	Wait, eat at home, await further ordering

The four movements together amount to a complete pastoral response — diagnosis, theology, warning, and instruction — to a partial set of questions. What Paul addressed, he addressed well. What he reserved, he reserved openly. The church has had to do the rest, in varying degrees of fidelity. The text is honest about which is which.

The passage does not resolve every Eucharistic question. It was not written to. It diagnoses one community’s crisis, re-grounds the meal in the dominical institution, names the seriousness of misuse, and gives the start of a practical pattern. The rest — the long history of Christian Eucharistic theology, practice, and division — is the church’s continuing work of “setting in order” what Paul left open.

The Health Question (v. 30) — the focused topic note on bodily consequence
Historical Context — the meal-and-banquet background
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