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

by N.T. Wright

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.

the stories Jesus tells about a king or master who goes away for a while and leaves his subjects or servants to trade with his money in his absence were not originally meant to refer to Jesus going away and leaving the church with tasks to get on with until his eventual second coming, even though they were read in that way from fairly early on.4 They belong in the Jewish world of the first century, where everyone would hear the story to be about God himself, having left Israel and the Temple at the time of the exile, coming back again at last, as the postexilic prophets had said he would,5 back to Israel, back to Zion, back to the Temple.

In their original setting, the point of these stories is that Israel’s God, yhwh, is indeed coming at last to Jerusalem, to the Temple—in and as the human person Jesus of Nazareth. The stories are, in that sense, not about the second coming of Jesus but about the first one.

Nor will it do to say, as do some who grasp part of the point but have not worked it through, that the events of a.d. 70 were themselves the second coming of Jesus so that ever since then we have been living in God’s new age and there is no further coming to await.

This results from a confusion: if the texts that speak of “the son of man coming on the clouds” refer to a.d. 70, as I have argued that (in part) they do, this doesn’t mean that a.d. 70 was the “second coming” because the “son of man” texts aren’t “second coming” texts at all, despite their frequent misreading that way. They are about Jesus’s vindication.

Let me say it emphatically for the sake of those who are confused on the point (and to the amusement, no doubt, of those who are not): the second coming has not yet occurred.

Scholars and simple folk alike can get led astray by the use of a single word to refer to something when that word in its original setting means both more and less than the use to which it is subsequently put. In this case the word in question is the Greek word parousia. This is usually translated “coming,” but literally it means “presence”—that is, presence as opposed to absence.

The word parousia occurs in two of the key passages in Paul (1 Thessalonians 4:15 and 1 Corinthians 15:23), and it is found frequently elsewhere in Paul and the New Testament.