Has Jesus Forgiven John Lennon’s Killer?

Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon in the back four times, killing him outside his New York City home on Dec. 8, 1980. I remember watching the news on TV at my parent’s home in New Jersey and feeling that a great light had gone out of the world. Reading about the most recent decision to deny Chapman parole, I squirmed uncomfortably at his claim that even though he understood why the law could not pardon him, he was confident that Jesus had. All these years later, I’m not sure I have. Or that I should.

Here’s what Chapman said:

“I found my peace in Jesus,” Chapman said. “I know him. He loves me. He has forgiven me. He has helped in my life like you wouldn’t believe.”

How can he be so confident? Intellectually, I share his faith in the limitlessness of God’s power to forgive. My colleague Adam Ericksen and I often find ourselves defending the uncomfortable truth that when we cannot find it in our hearts to forgive others, God has no such difficulty. Even when it comes to our own inability to forgive ourselves, God doesn’t hold back. Even from the cross, Jesus was offering his forgiveness to his murderers. Adam examines the difficulty Christians continue to have with the implications of Jesus pardoning his murderers in A God Torn to Pieces: Good Friday, Nietzsche, and Sacrifice.

Is God Doing the Right Thing?

In this case, I wonder if God is doing the right thing by granting parole, so to speak, when the state of New York will not. And they have been given plenty of chances!

The commissioners denied parole as they’ve done seven times before — in 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2012.

 The decision said the board found a “reasonable probability that (Chapman) would not live and remain at liberty without again violating the law” and that his release “would be incompatible with the welfare of society and would so deprecate the serious nature of the crime as to undermine respect for the law.”

I can’t judge whether Chapman is truly reformed or not. He has explained that he was depressed at the time, drinking, a lost soul seeking affirmation. “My self-esteem was shot,” he explained to the parole board, “and I was looking for an easy way out. It was a bad way out, but it was the way I chose and it was horrible.” The board was not convinced. They found a “reasonable probability” that Chapman would “violate the law” again, which I’m not in a position to argue with. But the thing with God is that he’s not calculating probabilities. In fact, God doesn’t wait for us to repent or reform or prove that we have changed – the forgiveness is just there waiting for us to pick up like a coin on the sidewalk. Just that easy to slip in our pocket and continue on down the road, forgiven. Though we find it hard to fathom, as Paul explained, “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.” (2 Corinthians 5:19)

What About Respect for the Law?

But if God does not count our sins against us, doesn’t that undermine respect for God’s laws? The parole board claims that granting Chapman parole would undermine the law; doesn’t it work that way with God’s laws, too? If Jesus really has forgiven Chapman – and I think he has – doesn’t that kind of take the teeth out of “thou shalt not kill”? This dilemma creates a stark fault line in Christianity between those who emphasize God’s forgiveness and those who emphasize God’s laws. It’s like we can’t find a way to make these two radically opposed ideas fit together in our brains, so we figure God has the same problem. And so we populate pews on each side of the fault line and worship different ideas of who God is – a God of love who forgives with reckless abandon or a God of justice who holds us all accountable with reprimands and punishments.

From Forgiveness to More-giveness

But what if God has no such problem? What if for God forgiveness doesn’t undermine anything, but creates everything? What if forgiveness is the path to renewal, to the new Creation we’ve been promised in Christ? (For a good illustration of how forgiveness heals and renews, read Adam’s article The Truth About Forgiveness.) I think the problem is that we don’t understand what forgiveness is and how it works. It’s a bad word because it evokes cause and effect thinking, as if we can do something to cause forgiveness. The opposite is true: Forgiveness is a gift freely given from God – it’s what the word grace means. No strings attached. Any gift you have to earn isn’t a gift at all – it’s a paycheck. So I recommend a new word to describe what God does. Instead of forgiveness let’s call God’s wildly extravagant generosity towards us “more-giveness.” I think that better describes the truth that we can’t cause God to love us or to stop loving us. Even in the face of the most horrendous things we can do, like killing the light that was John Lennon, God keeps showering us with love. Forgiveness means that nothing we can do can dam up the flow of God’s love. Nothing. (see Romans 8:35-38)

From that realization flows all the goodness and law-abiding behavior you can imagine. Chapman explained as much to the parole board.

He knew he “could have turned it around” and not killed Lennon, but he chose not to, he said. “That bright light of fame, of infamy, notoriety was there,” Chapman said. “I couldn’t resist it… It was a bad way out, but it was the way I chose and it was horrible.”

I’m not sure I can find it in my heart to forgive Chapman, especially when he says that right up to the moment when he fired the shots he “could have turned it around”. It makes me want to throttle him. But what he is pointing to is that the turnaround was possible if he had sought his affirmation in God’s love rather than in the notoriety the world offers. From knowing himself loved by God, Chapman would have found it surprisingly easy not to kill Lennon, or anyone else for that matter.

I may not be able to forgive him but that’s not important. My forgiveness is not the more-giveness that only God can offer. The more-giveness of God is the one thing that makes the laws of God so easy to follow that they will seem a bit superfluous. Because the response to being loved extravagantly is love. Love needs no laws to know right from wrong, no threat of punishment to cause good behavior. Love does those things on its own. The question, really, is not whether Jesus has forgiven Chapman, but whether Chapman has truly been able to receive that forgiveness. If he has, he has indeed been made new in Christ.