The Throne of the Majesty
I hope that your Groundhog Day is going well? Some of you remember the movie with the same title in which the Bill Murray character goes through an endless repetition of the same day. In many ways the movie, which is billed as a comedy, is asking the question of how we obtain meaning, if there is any at all to be had. In this sense, Groundhog Day is a parable for lives which can feel repetitious and sometimes seem to touch only tenuously at deep meaning.
Our passage for this week offers what we might consider a "deeper touch to transcendent meaning" in Hebrews 8:1 where we are told that Jesus, as our most excellent High Priest, "is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven". What is singular about this verse is the idea of "the Majesty". The word majesty is used only one other time in the the NT (Jude 25) and this is certainly the only time that it is used as a definite noun to describe God. Used this way we get a sense of the mind-blowing greatness of God. It is one thing to use a term like Father, which helps us formulate an idea about God, or to used terms like omnipotent or omniscience to seek to describe an attribute of God. But it seems to me, that the preacher of Hebrews here uses a word more transcendent and less specific to remind us that God is bigger than anything that we we can strictly conceptualize. The preacher is seeking to lift up the drooping hands and weak knees of the believers by saying there is a Being in the universe that is so absolutely worthy of our worship. A Being that gives meaning to every blade of grass and every seemingly pointless interaction. That there is such a Being is mind-blowing enough, but to note further that Jesus, as Priest who represents God to us and us to God, is seated at the right hand of the throne of this Majesty serving us! I don't know about you, but at the very least the preacher here is pressing us to consider that there is something more to this universe than the everyday humdrum of life. Taken in their fullness, the preacher's words are an invitation to celebrate a life that is rich with the Majesty brought near to us!