N. T. Wright on Jesus' Ascension

N. T. Wright gives needed clarity to the meaning of Jesus' ascension. He writes,

"In both the Nicene and Apostle’s Creeds, it also says that Jesus, through his ascension, was “seated at the right hand of the Father.” In ancient Jewish thought, with echoes of Daniel 7, this could only mean that, from that moment, Jesus was the Father’s right-hand man, in charge of the whole world. But in our own day the “ascension” is just a way of saying that Jesus “went to heaven when he died.” To speak of him “sitting at the Father’s right hand” has become simply a fancy, perhaps even a fanciful, way of saying “he entered into a very splendid and glorious position.” We have been lured, perhaps by our embarrassment at the literalistic sense of Jesus flying up like a spaceman to a “heaven” located a few miles up within our universe, into ignoring the real meaning both of “heaven” (which is not a place within our universe at all, but God’s place, intersecting with our world in all sorts of ways) and of the ascension itself, which is about the sovereignty of Jesus as the Father’s accredited and appointed agent. We have, as a result, understood the ascension in vague terms of supernatural glory, rather than in the precise terms (as in Matt. 28: 18; Acts 1: 6–11) of Jesus’s authority over the world. In fact, the ascension, for many people, implies Jesus’s absence, not his universal presence and sovereign rule. And this time it isn’t only Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John who will raise objections; it’s Paul, Hebrews, and Revelation as well. They all think that Jesus is already in charge of the world. (Check out, for instance, 1 Cor. 15: 20–28; Heb. 2: 5–9; Rev. 5: 6–14). That was what they understood by “God’s kingdom."

Wright, N. T. How God Became King p. 15-16, quoted in On Earth as in Heaven: Daily Wisdom for Twenty-First Century Christians (kindle)