The main thing for Luke in the Eucharist, his special, personal thing, is not sacrifice, as in Mark-Matthew-Paul, not love, as in John, but the kingdom of God. This is how it all begins:

… I will not eat the Passover, until it is completed in the kingdom of God;

… I will not drink of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.

This is how it ends:

… The kingdom I bequeath unto you, as my Father hath commanded me, that ye may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom. (Luke 22:29-30.)

Night is still all over the earth, pitch darkness, but here, in the Upper Room, it is already day; The highest point of the earth, the summit of the peaks, illuminated by the first ray of the rising sun, is here. There will be the kingdom of God over all the earth, and here it already is: "Thy kingdom come,"

Do not be afraid, little flock! for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. (Luke 12:32.)

What was begun on the Mount of Breads, continued on the Mount of Beatitudes, is over here – revealed.

Blessed is he who eats bread in the kingdom of God! (Luke 14:15).

This blessedness has already come here: the taste of bread and wine in the Eucharist is the taste of the Kingdom of God.

XV

The Kingdom of God is the end of the world: the mystery of the Eucharist is the mystery of the End. [807]

The closest thing to Luke's testimony, not ours, of course, imaginary, late, but genuine, ancient, are the two earliest testimonies about the Eucharist that have come down to us in the Jerusalem communities – the "house churches" of the first disciples.

One of them, from the 80s, is in the Acts of the Apostles of the same Luke (2:42-46); the other, from the first half of the second century, is the Eucharistic prayer in the "Teaching of the Twelve Apostles":