The Ascension
The coronation between the empty tomb and the promised return
Most of us tell the story with a gap in it. We dwell on the cross, we rejoice at the empty tomb, and then we skip ahead to "and He will come again," stepping right over the event the New Testament treats as the turning point: the ascension. Forty days after the resurrection, Jesus was taken up out of their sight. It is easy to read that as Jesus leaving, the sad end of the visits. The Bible reads it the other way. It is not mainly Jesus going away; it is Jesus being crowned. The risen Christ did not retire. He took the throne.
He was taken up
Luke tells it twice, soberly, as something that happened in front of witnesses: "he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven" (Luke 24:51). At the opening of Acts a cloud receives Him, and as the disciples stand staring upward, two men in white tell them to stop gazing and start expecting: "this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11). It is the same body that came out of the tomb, the wounds still in it, now carried beyond our sight but not out of existence. The man Jesus did not dissolve into a spirit. He went somewhere, as a person goes.
Seated at the right hand: the coronation
What the ascension means is enthronement, and the Bible says so by reaching for its favorite royal text. Psalm 110 opens with the Father speaking to the Son: "The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool" (Psalm 110:1), the single Old Testament verse the New Testament quotes more than any other. Jesus had claimed that very seat at His trial, under oath, which is part of why they condemned Him: "ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven" (Mark 14:62). So Paul can say "God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name" (Philippians 2:9). "The right hand" is not a place of rest after a job done; in the Bible it is the seat of authority. The session of Christ means He is reigning now, this minute, over a world that does not yet see it.
He ever liveth to make intercession
And the King on the throne is also the Priest at the altar. The ascended Christ did not leave us to fend for ourselves; He went up to represent us. Hebrews says it is the very reason He can save completely: "he ever liveth to make intercession for them" (Hebrews 7:25). Paul puts our whole security on it: it is Christ who died and rose, "who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us" (Romans 8:34). And John gives the trembling conscience its comfort: "we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous" (1 John 2:1). Whatever else is true of this moment, this is true: there is a man in heaven praying for you, and He has never lost a case He pleaded by His own blood.
It was good that He went
Strangest of all, Jesus told the disciples His leaving was for their gain, because the ascension is what opened the way for Pentecost. "It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you" (John 16:7). The Son ascends to the Father, and from the throne pours out the Spirit on the church. Peter says it on the day it happens: Jesus, "being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost," then "shed forth this" (Acts 2:33). The going made room for the coming. A Christ present in one body in one place became, by His Spirit, present to His whole church everywhere at once (see The Holy Spirit and The Trinity).
The ascension is also the shape of the promise. The angels did not say Jesus was gone; they said He would return exactly as He left, "so come in like manner." However the church argues over the timing of His return, the manner is settled in this one verse: visibly, bodily, the same Jesus, no secret and no metaphor. The empty throne-room of the world has an heir, and He has said He is coming back to claim it.
Where this lands
The ascension closes the gap we keep leaving in the story. Between the resurrection and the return there is not an absence but a reign: the crucified man is on the throne, the wounds are still in His hands, and those hands are doing two things at once, holding the government of all things and lifting up our names before the Father. History is not waiting for a missing founder to maybe come back. It is being governed by a King who has already won, and who prays for His people while He waits to come for them. The creeds have kept the line for sixteen centuries, "he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God" (see what the early church confessed).
Related: The Resurrection, The Holy Spirit, What the Early Church Confessed, The Trinity, and The Cross. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the Father's word is marked in gold, the Son's in purple.