Some unsympathetic interpreters of Luke-Acts, seeing it as a nostalgic and triumphalist piece of propaganda for emergent “early Catholicism,” have in effect argued that in these texts early Christian eschatology has been allowed to “crust and sugar over—like a syrupy sweet.”41 But the foregoing discussion has sought to show, instead, that Luke has rendered an “orderly account” that gives the community of faith a firm foothold in time and history. What happens to a dream deferred? It becomes, in Luke, the sustaining vision for a community setting out on a long and joyful pilgrimage.
