NOTES for Luk 7:36-50
The short parable Jesus told Simon about two debtors seems paradoxical at first glance: if one follows its logic, it turns out that a person's relationship, whether with God or with neighbor, becomes stronger the more that person has been forgiven. From here it is not far to the well-known folk "wisdom": "if you do not sin, you will not repent; if you do not repent, you will not be saved." So then, sin for the sake of salvation? If we were normal people, not damaged by the fall, this kind of reasoning would be completely fair. The trouble, however, is that we are not.
The parable Jesus told Simon, like some of His other parables, is told on the basis of the actual condition of fallen humanity. And here it does indeed turn out that the measure of God's love for a person and the measure of a person's trust in God are determined by how much God is ready to forgive a person and to what extent the person dares to hope for forgiveness.
It would seem that dependence hinders love. In a world damaged by sin, that is how it is. But the issue here is not dependence as such: after all, a person is dependent on God too, and truly dependent; each of us depends on Him as on no one and nothing else. He knows how to turn the situation, how to guide matters, so that we do not notice this dependence at all. We can even ignore Him completely if we wish. And the only form His relationship to us takes is love.
Therefore dependence in itself by no means hinders love, and if obstacles arise, they arise only in the fallen world, not because of dependence as such, but because of the sin that, in a world damaged by sin, distorts and perverts every relationship. In the normal case, dependence of people on one another is something entirely ordinary and natural, in itself in no way darkening their relationships. And in that case the depth of relationships can indeed be determined by the depth of dependence.
It is another matter that the laws of the untransformed world sometimes make such dependence a heavy burden for the dependent side. Then readiness to lighten this burden or remove it altogether, for example by forgiving a debt for someone who will never be able to repay it, becomes an expression of practical, effective love for the dependent person. And there is nothing surprising in the fact that the relationships here are connected with how deep the dependence was of the one who received relief on the one who relieved his burden.
Of course, in the Kingdom such a situation simply cannot exist, just as it could not have existed in our world if it had not been damaged by the fall. But in the concrete situation in which all of us find ourselves today, relationships of love sometimes take precisely the form spoken of in the Savior's parable.