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":

We thank Thee, Father,

, for life and knowledge, which Thou hast given us through Jesus Thy servant.

… Just as this bread, once scattered on the mountains, is united into one, so may the Church, from all the ends of the earth, be united in Thy kingdom.

… The mercy of God – (the kingdom of God) – may come, may this world pass away,

. Lord, come!

. Amen.. [808]

The main thing here, as in Luke's Eucharist, is the kingdom of God – the end of the world. Not a word about blood, about sacrifice either; everything is only about bread, about the Kingdom – the End. All this is terribly forgotten, lost in the later Eucharist – already the "church mass": there is no longer a real, satisfying hunger, bread, no Kingdom, no End.

And here is another, even earlier, testimony in the Acts of the Apostles (2:42-46):

… (the brethren) were always in communion, κοινωνία, and in the breaking of bread... and all had something in common... And every day, breaking bread from house to house, they ate with joy;

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