“Sophisicated Christians will quickly say [about the claim that Jesus ascended into heaven] that all that sort of language is simply metaphorical. It doesn’t mean that Jesus has literally gone to some place in the solar system millions of miles away. But an awful lot of people on the edge of the Church, and outside looking in, still imagine that Christians are committed to believing something like that, and they of course find it incredible…
‘Heaven’ is, in fact, one of the misused religious words around today, with the possible exception of ‘God’ itself. The biblical notion of heaven is not of a place far away ‘way beyond the blue.’ Nor is it simply, as some have said in reaction to that older notion, a state of mind or heart which some people can attain here and now. Heaven is God’s space, which intersects with our space but transcends it. It is, if you like, a further dimension of our world, not a place far removed at one extreme of our world…The Christian hope is not, then, despite popular impressions, that we will simply ‘go to heaven when we die.’ As far as it goes, that statement is all right; after death those who love God will be with him, will be in his dimension. But the final Christian hope is that the two dimensions, heaven and earth, at present separated by a veil of invisibility caused by human rebellion, will be united together, so that there will be new heavens and a new earth…
The ascension of Jesus, then, is his going, not way beyond the stars, but into this space, this dimension. Notice what this does to our notion of heaven. The Jesus who has gone there is the human Jesus. People sometimes talk as if Jesus started off just being divine, then stopped being divine and became human, then stopped being human and went back to being divine again. That is precisely what the ascension rules out. The Jesus who has gone, now, into God’s dimension, until the time when the veil is lifted and God’s multidimensional reality is brought in all its glory, is the human Jesus. He bears human flesh, and the marks of the man-made nails and spear, to this day, as he lives within God’s dimension, not far away but as near to us as breath itself.
This means, contrary to what some might suppose, that a doctrine of heaven focused on the ascension can never be used as a way of oppressing people, or of diminishing the value of their humanness. On the contrary, it affirms the true and lasting value of being human. The risen Jesus was more human, not less, than he was before: his risen humanness is the affirmation of his previous humanness, only now without the frailty and the dying which before then he shared with the rest of us. His resurrection is thus God’s way of saying that there is such a thing as genuine humanness, that human life is not a Sartrean sick joke, promising everything and giving nothing.
But, if this is so, the ascension is the affirmation that God has taken that fully human, deeply and richly human being Jesus, and has embraced him to himself within his own dimension, his own space, making him indeed Lord of the world. God always intended that his human creatures should inherit the world, the created order, to rule over it with wisdom and gentleness, to bring it order and to enhance its beauty. In the ascended human Jesus that vision is in principle realized. There is always a risk that by talking of Jesus ‘going to heaven’ we allow a false picture of heaven to color the image we now have of Jesus. What I am suggesting is that, instead, the true image of the human Jesus, the very Jesus we are called to follow, should subvert our false pictures of heaven, and should become the center of the true picture instead.” (N. T. Wright, Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship, pp. 99-102)