Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

by N.T. Wright

First, when Jesus speaks of “the son of man coming on the clouds,” he is talking not about the second coming but, in line with the Daniel 7 text he is quoting, about his vindication after suffering. The “coming” is an upward, not a downward, movement. In context, the key texts mean that though Jesus is going to his death, he will be vindicated by events that will take place afterward.3 What those events are remains cryptic from the point of view of the passages in question, which is one good reason for thinking them authentic, but they certainly include both Jesus’s resurrection and the destruction of the Temple, the system that opposed him and his mission. And the language, significantly, is precisely the language that the early church used as the least inadequate way of talking about the strange thing that happened after Jesus’s resurrection: his “ascension,” his glorification, his “coming,” not to earth, but to heaven, to the Father.