The Cause of Jesus' Death

The Gospel of Mark records that Jesus was nailed to the cross at about nine o'clock in the morning and that He died the same day at about three o'clock in the afternoon. Although He had suffered scourging, He undoubtedly possessed enough natural vigor to maintain His breathing on the cross for more than six hours. The malefactors crucified by His side were still alive at the end of the day, even though they probably had been scourged also. To hasten their deaths so that no executions would be in progress during the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the soldiers in attendance broke their legs. Once they could no longer push themselves up, they died rapidly. But when the soldiers came to Jesus, they found that He was dead already. He could not have succumbed to suffocation so soon. What then was the cause of His death?

We must remember that Jesus died only when He chose to die. It was impossible that God Incarnate should die apart from His own consent. Yet, when His body could no longer function without supernatural help, He did not cling to life. Instead, He commended His spirit to the Father and breathed no more.

We gain some insight on Jesus' bodily state at the time of death by looking at the postmortem evidence. Shortly after He gave up His spirit, a Roman soldier made sure He was dead by thrusting a spear upward into His side, undoubtedly into His heart cavity. John reports that from the wound emerged a mixture of blood and water. Ordinarily, having no blood pressure, a corpse does not bleed. What then caused the bloody seepage from the wound in Jesus' side? The most satisfactory explanation is that the fluid came from the punctured heart cavity, its presence there being a clear sign of a ruptured heart. The water reported by John was the watery fluid normally present in the heart cavity. To this was added blood leaking from the torn wall of the heart.

What caused Jesus' heart to break? It is possible that violent contractions induced by severe emotional and physical stress so squeezed the blood inside the heart that internal pressure rose to bursting strength. In other words, Jesus' broken heart could have been caused by His boundless agony of soul, as He bore our sins and felt the infinite weight and coldness of the Father's wrath.

When we consider all that Christ suffered for our sake, how can we refuse to love Him? In the early centuries of the church, many proved their love for Christ by literally following Him to a cross. They died as He did, by submitting to the torments of crucifixion. Many other believers throughout the centuries have also accepted a martyr's death. But what are you and I willing to sacrifice for Jesus? Far from laying down our lives in testimony to our faith, we balk at doing anything inconvenient for Christ. We avoid personal devotions, we ignore opportunities for witness, we dislike extending ourselves in acts of kindness. Whereas Christ gave us His own life's blood, we begrudge Him ten minutes of our time.

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