What Really Killed Jesus?

10 Days to the Cross:  Day 8

Ok, this is technically day 9, but I was under the weather last night and didn't have time to get this one posted:-)  The Day 9 post will follow later this afternoon.

Crucifixion is an ugly and brutal way to die.  Historians believe that the practice of crucifixion was first widely practiced by the Carthaginians.  Carthage was Rome's mortal enemy.  They fought a series of major conflicts in the 2nd and 3rd century B.C. for control of the Mediterranean.  Rome won the wars, burned Carthage to the ground and even spread salt on the fields to make Carthage uninhabitable.  It was a nasty conflict.  The Carthaginians were renowned for cruelty.  They sacrificed children to Molech, one of their gods, and they crucified slaves and political prisoners, perhaps even Roman prisoners. 

Having been on the receiving end of Carthaginian terror, the Romans soon adopted crucifixion as a way to execute a criminal and send a message of intimidation to the rest of a community.   After crushing Spartacus' slave revolt in 71 BC, the Roman general Crassus crucified 6,000 captured slaves, lining the Appian way, from Rome to Capua, with their crosses.  Jesus was viewed by both the Jewish Sanhedrin and by the Roman authorities as a political threat.  Their goal was not to execute him quietly.  They wanted to intimidate people by his death. 

Crucifixion is effective as a method of intimidation because it is agonizingly slow and cruel.  Nailed by hands/wrists and feet to a cross shaped piece of wood, the condemned is left suspended in the air.  The angle at which a crucifixion victim hangs makes it extremely difficult to breathe.  A person in that position has to pull themselves up by their nailed hands in order to inhale.  Eventually, worn out, they can no longer lift themselves and slowly suffocate or die of exhaustion.  This process in most cases took hours, sometimes days to kill the victim.  The Jewish historian Josephus writes of people being taken down from the cross after several hours and living. 

Often, to hurry the execution along, the Romans would break the legs of the victim, eliminating their ability to draw themselves up to breathe.  John records that the Romans soldiers broke the legs of the two criminals on either side of Jesus, but when they got to Jesus, he was already dead. 

I've often wondered why Jesus died relatively so quickly.  As I look at Scripture, I think that the emotional and spiritual trauma of the day had as much or more to do with Jesus death as the actual crucifixion.  Isaiah tells us that he "took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows...The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all."  The weight of the sin of all humanity was placed on the shoulders of Jesus that day.  Have you ever felt really convicted and miserable about your own sin, something you've done wrong?  Imagine the heaviness you feel in that moment, multiplied a billion times over.  I believe that is something like what Jesus was enduring as he hung there on the cross. 

While the crucifixion was brutal, I believe that the spiritual dynamics of the day were far worse for Jesus.  Could it be that the spiritual weight of our sin literally broke Christ's heart?