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A “Mediator” is the middle person who plugs the breech between two opposing sides.  Man and God were in separate camps because Man had rejected God and went his own way.  But Jesus bridged the gap: He brought us back to God by His sacrificial death on the Cross.  He is the Mediator.  And because he bought us for God by His blood – and not by other methods – Jesus is the Mediator of the New Covenant.   The table below summarises the Old and New Covenants.

But more than the technical merits of the process, it is the essence of the person carrying out the change that makes the difference.  Jesus, the mediator of the new covenant, made the difference because He was not just doing the job – as the priest of old was, going through the motions, though solemnly.  Jesus was born to die.  If any of us knew that we were born to die, how miserable that would be.  Yet, Jesus went about his life, fulfilling the mission of the Father – teaching and preaching glad tidings: that God had the new way to forgive man of sins.  Jesus is the Way.

Jesus went out of his sinless heavenly realm – to be squeezed in time and space as the Son of Man, sinless, but surrounded by sin of mankind.  It must have been such suffering that He cried for the hardness of man’s heart (Luke 19:41).  Think, too, about His agony in Gethsemane, when he anguished about obedience to the Cross – to the point that His sweat was like drops of blood (Luke 22:44).  And ponder the Cross: on top of the social humiliation, he was separated in the worst of ways from His Father – in soul communion – when the weight of the world’s sin was on His shoulders and the Father looked away.  For Him who spent hours in the wilderness so He could draw near to the Father, the spiritual desolation of the Cross must have been unimaginable.  Let us then draw near to Jesus – our Mediator for He deserves our hearts, our lives and our all.