The Ascension

Acts 1:9-11

And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

The reality is this: “heaven” in the Bible is God’s space, and “earth” is our space. “Heaven” isn’t just the “happy place where God’s people go when they die,” and it certainly isn’t our “home” if by that you mean (as some Christians, sadly, have meant) that our eventual destiny is to leave “earth” altogether and go to “heaven” instead. God’s plan, as we see again and again in the Bible, is for “new heavens and new earth,” and for them to be joined together in that renewal once and for all. “Heaven” may well be our temporary home after this present life; but the whole new world, united and transformed, is our eventual destination.

Part of the point about Jesus’ resurrection is that it was the beginning of precisely that astonishing and world-shattering renewal.

Neither Luke nor the other early Christians thought that Jesus had suddenly become a primitive spaceman, heading off into orbit or beyond, so that if you searched throughout the far reaches of what we call “space” you would eventually find him there. They believed that “heaven” and “earth” are the two interlocking spheres of God’s reality, and that the risen body of Jesus is the first (and so far the only) object which is fully at home in both and hence in either, anticipating the time when everything will be renewed and joined together.

Jesus had gone into God’s dimension of reality; but he’ll be back on the day when that dimension of and our present one are brought together once and for all (12-3).