Dear beloved congregation of St. Paul,

This gospel reading can easily leave us feeling confused. Why is that that Jesus teaches about forgiveness and yet, in the parable, seems to portray God as unforgiving and even cruel? Take these lines, for instance: “And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So, my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

How are we supposed to deal with this contradiction? Should we conclude that God is a hypocrite? That He commands us to forgive boundlessly when He is only willing to forgive under certain conditions?

I tend to think this is a false problem. We are confused because we’re used to reading the Scriptures in literalistic ways, and this is why we rush to compare the lord in this story to God: He throws someone into prison to be tortured, and so we assume that God must have a violent temper like his.

But thankfully, we do not need to read the passage in this way. For most of Christian history, the prevailing tradition of interpretation was the allegorical method, and if we read the parable through this lens, Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness becomes far more consistent and God’s boundless love can finally manifest.

It was Origen, one of the church fathers, who best taught the church how to deal with difficult texts—with texts that, on the surface, appear to portray God as evil. He referred to them as scandals and argued that their purpose is not to show us what God is like but to remind us of the absurdity of a literalist reading of Scripture.

This is why St. Gregory of Nyssa insisted that, in the Exodus story, God never actually killed the firstborn sons in Egypt. And this is also why the desert fathers and mothers read the battle psalms as allegories of the spiritual combat that we endure in prayer and not as literal calls to war. And this is why, when we encounter the lord in this parable, a man who displays anger and violence, we can see this not as a literal description of God’s character but as a scandal meant to draw us into a deeper and more spiritual reading of the passage—to draw us beyond the letter and, ultimately, into union with God.

I am not going to offer a specific interpretation here of this lord or even of his role in the story: I am only suggesting that whatever the interpretation may arise, the one we can confidently abandon is the literal one.

And this brings us to another rule, so to speak, for interpreting Scripture in a spiritual way: The interpretation must reveal God as He really is. Let me explain. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us that God is simple, and this means that He is one and that His attributes are identical with His essence. In other words, He is what He does. And so, God is not—strictly speaking—loving: This would imply that God possesses love as an attribute and that He can choose to love sometimes and to withhold love at other times, just like the cruel lord in our parable. No, God is love. Love is not an action that He performs when the mood strikes. Love is a name for His very existence.

But the literal reading is actually a denial of God’s simplicity. If He forgives in one moment and refuses to forgive in the next moment, then He changes, and if He changes then He is not eternal, and if He is not eternal, then He is not God. Love is just an attribute that He selectively displays; it is not a name for His very being. And so, the literal reading actually does not concern God at all.

And if we read this passage literally, then when Jesus commands us to forgive, this is not a call to imitate God. After all, if God is like the cruel lord and can choose on a whim to withhold forgiveness, then forgiveness is not a way for us to share in His life. It is just an empty and arbitrary gesture.

But what happens if we see this parable as pointing to God as He really is: as simple, as identical with love? Then when Jesus tells us to forgive without measure, He is inviting us to share and participate in the very life of God. And the cruel lord in the parable is not a barrier to this understanding because we are under no obligation to read his actions literally. We can finally see that love is a name for God and that forgiveness is a mode of union with God.

St. Gregory of Nyssa teaches us that God is infinite. If God is love, this also means that love is infinite and boundless. But a literal reading contradicts this. After all, if God is like the lord from the parable, He only forgives under certain conditions. His temper is unpredictable. And at the end of the day, this is not a pious acknowledgement that God’s ways are mysterious; it is a denial of God’s infinity. Because if God is like this, then his love is measured and easily withheld. It is not boundless. It is not infinite. If God is like this, He is not God. And so, the literal reading is not only mistaken—it is, in a technical sense, atheism, the denial of God.

And so, I ask again: What happens if we see this parable as pointing to God in His fullness as God? Then Christ’s parable reveals God’s infinite love. As we forgive without measure, we reflect the boundlessness of God’s love. And this is yet another reason why Jesus is inviting us to share in the very life of God.

It is depressing that the practice of literalistic reading has taken hold in our churches, but it is hardly surprising. After all, many people in our day portray God as a violent judge. And in this atmosphere, is not difficult to see why people rush to accept the lord in our parable as a literal depiction of God and not as a scandal.

In our day is common to hear the penal substitutionary atonement theory preached as if it is the gospel itself. This is a dismal story: God is angry with us because we are lawbreakers, and so He punishes Jesus in our place. And if we only believe in the sacrifice of Christ, we are forgiven.

But if this is the gospel, it is strange indeed that this view of salvation did not appear in the Christian tradition until the 16th century. And it is strange indeed that St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Maximus the Confessor, and other church fathers preached a radically different gospel: that God became a man so that we might share in the very life of God. Theirs was a gospel of union with God in Christ, and it was, in the truest sense, good news.

At St. Paul’s Bangkok, I hope that we can be a community that recovers a more spiritual way of reading the Scriptures. After all, this is also a way to recover the gospel as good news: that God became man in Christ that we might partake in His life, which is love. And this love is not arbitrary and measured: it is one and infinite.

And so, may we forgive without limits so that we can know a God whose love is boundless.

Amen.