By: The Rev. Matthew Woodley, Iterim Dean, Church of the Resurrection, Wheaton, IL

Let’s begin by imagining a stage that represents the span of a human life. On one side, we have the end-of-life, and on the other end, we have the beginning-of-life. That would be the arc of a whole human life. Some people have short arcs; some people have long arcs.

I want you to imagine a woman — let’s call her Maria. She lives in West Chicago. We’re going to start at the end of her life. She’s 93 years old. When she was 89, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She has profound memory issues. Most days she can’t remember her children’s names. 

Now let’s look at the other end of the stage, to the beginning of her life. She was born in Mexico City, immigrated to America when she was 20 years old. She came out of profound poverty and violence and became a U.S. citizen when she was 33. She was very successful, first as a community leader and then as mayor of West Chicago.

Successful and competent until around age 87, as she ages, she declines, and now she has Alzheimer’s as life winds down. 

What do we know about Maria? Well, Biblically speaking, we know a couple of things. First of all, we know that she is made in the image of God. Genesis 1 describes this profound, revolutionary, beautiful, soul-stirring vision of what it means to be a human being, to be made in the image and likeness of God.

Throughout her whole life, she never loses that. That’s never degraded, or diminished, and never decreases. She is always fully made in the image of God. The second thing we know is that throughout her whole life, at all these various stages — from the time she was an embryo to the time she is 93 years old, and everything in between — she is living a life of dependence upon God and others.

I mean, she may try to live independent of God, but even as the Apostle Paul says, “In God we live and move and have our being.” So truly, she lives in dependence upon God and other people.

Now I want to press into this idea of dependence because this is at the heart of a Biblical vision of what it means to be a human being.

I want us to know from Scripture that dependency on God and others is not some kind of defect that we need to overcome, as our culture will often tell us. It is rather the normal posture that all of us receive from the Lord. We even see from Scripture that it is the place where we encounter the power of the risen Jesus — in our weakness, in our dependence, in our vulnerabilities.

And the church embodies this theology of dependence. We live it, become it, and reflect it to the world, as we bear one another’s burdens. We become a place where there are networks of lavish giving and graceful receiving in this life of interdependence.

And let me just say, if we don’t understand how to meet others in their dependency — and that we ourselves are dependent on God and others — we will live subhuman Christian lives. It’s not a better humanity; it’s a lesser vision of humanity. But if we get this right, we are constantly tapping into the power and the presence of Jesus for ourselves and for one another.

We are living between two radically different worldviews: the Biblical worldview — this life of dependence — and the other worldview, which is a life of radical independence from God and from each other, where we do not need the Lord. We do not need other people. Every day we are being shaped by either one or the other, depending on how we choose to live our lives.

So let’s explore this better story of human dependence.

The dependence that the Bible talks about can be seen in 2 Corinthians 12, St. Paul describes a spiritual experience he had which was so dramatic and overwhelming, this encounter with the Lord, was like being transported into the heavenly realms. Then he was tempted to boast about it, to become arrogant and conceited about it, that the Lord gave him a gift, and that was the gift of a thorn in the flesh.

So he says in verse seven, “To keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited.” Now Satan meant it for harm, but the Lord actually meant it for good in his life.

What was the thorn in the flesh? Nobody really knows. It could have been a chronic eye issue. It could have been a health issue. It could have been some other kind of affliction. For us, a thorn in the flesh can be any kind of disease, relational hurt or longing, a disability, a child with disabilities, or some kind of temptation that we constantly face.

The thorn in the flesh was there to blow the story of radical independence to bits. So, in verse eight: “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me.” Now I love that the great apostle St. Paul didn’t just say, “Whatever, Lord.” He said, “I don’t want this, Lord. I’d rather not have this.” And the Lord let him pray that, let him express his anguish.

But verse nine: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities…”

And then he ends this section with a zinger of a one-liner: “When I am weak, then I am strong.” Why? Because when I’m weak, when I know my dependency, and I rely on God and others, I am creating openings for the power of Jesus to flow into my life.

Dependence is not a defect to overcome. It’s the place where we meet the risen Christ.

One more example real quick. If you back up to 2 Corinthians 4, Paul comes to this remarkable city of such great power, prestige, wealth, sophistication, and diversity. And he comes to this church in Corinth, and he proclaims this theology of dependence and the theology of the cross, that Jesus died for us and for our sins, and that actually shows God’s power. Chapter four, verse seven: “We have this treasure in jars of clay.” What’s the treasure? He talks about it in verse six. The short way to say it: it’s the presence of Jesus. Where is it? It’s in a jar of clay. It’s in me. It’s in you. It’s in our bodies. We are embodied creatures, and that’s where Jesus dwells within us. Paul goes on to say we are afflicted, perplexed, driven to despair, persecuted, struck down — but we never lose the presence of Jesus.

And then onto verse 10: we are carrying in our body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. So it is in our weakness, in our dependence, that the power of Christ comes in and goes out through us to others. 

This is at the heart of the better story of being human.

Being in the Imago Dei also means that we are creative, that we are inventive, that God has given us agency, strengths, and gifts. But also at the heart of this story is this theology of dependence. There are competing anthropologies that we are facing in our culture today.

On the one hand, we have a Biblical anthropology, which talks about weakness, vulnerability, and dependence. We are truly dependent on God and others. But there is another anthropology that is very strong in our culture. It is basically the default one that is often referred to now as expressive individualism.

It is a form of radical independence from God and others where we get to the place where we say, “I don’t really need God.” Even though in Him we live and move and take our every breath, we say we don’t need Him. We don’t need other people. We don’t need to live under any kind of external authority. We can be radically independent from authority or morality. We choose who we want to be.

It really is the position from Genesis chapter three. It’s not just our cultural moment — it’s every cultural moment. The human heart tends this way, to agree with the devil: “I can decide what is good and evil. I don’t need someone else to choose that for me.”

And it’s not just out there; it’s in here. It’s in the church. It’s not just “those people.” This is something we wrestle with every single day of our lives. Every time you choose to sin, you are basically living in the story of expressive individualism: I want what I want, I get what I want, I decide what is good and evil.

So this is a battle we all fight. According to the Biblical view, that story is a lie. It ignores reality because you are never independent from God. You are always dependent on others. It is a better story — a better anthropology — to say that dependence, in line with the Biblical view, is not marginal. It is central to our humanity.

We have physical weaknesses. Our bodies get sick. We age. We grow old. Eventually we die. We have fears. We have anxieties. We carry burdens. We have moral weaknesses. We can deceive ourselves. We can be tempted. We can give in to sin so easily. All of these factors make us dependent on God and others.

And this is where the church comes in and says, “Yes, we embody this. We live this out together.” We bear each other’s burdens in a variety of ways.

Example 1: First, let’s consider embryos. Why do we care? If you know your biology, an egg is produced by a woman, but it will never turn into life unless it is met by a male sperm, and then it becomes an embryo — a person whose life we may count in days or even hours.

An embryo is not something different from a human being. The embryo is a person at the earliest stage of natural development — a unique, unified, self-integrated person. As someone has said, an embryo is not potential life; he or she is life with potential. Just as a two-year-old or a thirteen-year-old is in a stage on the way to adulthood, the embryo is in a stage on their way to becoming a toddler, on their way to becoming that ninety-three-year-old Maria we discussed earlier.

Who you are today was once an embryo. You went through that stage to become who you are today. An embryo is not a special case. It is a test case. How we view the embryo reveals our anthropology. What do we really believe about being human?

An embryo is a person who is wholly embodied and utterly vulnerable. Dependence is not a defect; it is a feature of who we are. And dependence calls forth obligation from us. As believers in the Imago Dei, here is something I think we should agree on: we reject any forms of technology, current or future, that dishonor the dignity of the human person at any stage of life. 

Example 2: Now let’s consider someone impacted with a disability. People impacted by a disability are not exceptions, their dependence is simply more visible. Radical independence is a lie. It is not reality; it is denial. People with disabilities help us understand that. 

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul says the parts of the body that seem weaker are indispensable, and the parts we think less honorable we treat with greater honor.

Persons with disabilities are not people we serve “down to.” They are fellow image bearers — equally Imago Dei. They are also our teachers. They show us what it means to be human, what it means to live in interdependence: I need you, and you need me. And in that shared dependence, we receive together the power of God — the gift of giving and the gift of sharing one another’s burdens.

Example 3: Finally, let’s consider what happens at the end of life with the availability of physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia, helping people die before natural death.

On March 27 of 2025, a brilliant Nobel Prize–winning economist named Daniel Kahneman flew to Switzerland, took a few days of vacation, checked into a clinic, and had a physician assist him in taking his own life. He was ninety years old and mostly in good health. He simply thought it was time to go.

His friends were shocked because he hadn’t told them. Daniel Kahneman said in a letter, “I didn’t want to deal anymore with what he called the misery and indignities of the last years of life.” He wanted to go out on his terms. A friend said he was afraid of losing control or of being dependent on others. 

Why is this important? Because people can get into a frame of mind where they begin to believe their life is burdensome and they are worthless.

In the Biblical vision, illness, dementia, aging, and mental illness do not obliterate the Imago Dei in you or in anyone else. Actually, our dependencies reveal what it has always meant to be human. Dependence at the end-of-life is simply another example of what we face throughout the whole arc of life. “When I am weak, I am strong.” When I understand my dependence, I am relying on the strength of the Lord.

My dad died in November of 2019. He grew up in a single-mother home in poverty in South Minneapolis and became a successful and respected doctor of internal medicine in Minneapolis. He raised seven kids in nine years — kudos to my mom for that too. He put seven kids through four years of college each. Twenty-eight years of college. Pretty amazing.

He was a man of deep conviction. When I was growing up, sometimes I agreed with him; sometimes I didn’t. When I became a new Christian, I heard my dad say things like, “When people get old and become useless, they should — like some tribal groups — wander off and die. They should take the initiative.”

I didn’t have much theological understanding at the time, but I remember thinking, as a Christian, that doesn’t sound right. So I told my dad, “Dad, I don’t agree with that. It seems like the tribe should take care of people.” That felt natural to me.

He retired around age 75, stopped working completely, and that is when he began to struggle with feelings that his life was basically over — that he was useless, that he was a burden. He began to decline emotionally, and it became a real struggle.

Then in 2010 my own life fell apart in ways I never imagined. I lost my job. I stopped being a pastor. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I was 50 years old and freshly aware of my dependence on God and others. And you know who was there for me as much as anyone? My dad.

We had never been very close before — always butting heads, always feeling like he didn’t understand me or love me the way I wanted. But then my dad showed up. He became a dad to me. He began opening up about his life — his abusive alcoholic father, the poverty he grew up in.

In the last few years of his life, when he was at his lowest, he let me read the Gospel to him. He let me pray with him. A few months before he died, he allowed me to administer last rites. I am so thankful that time was not cut short. I was able, in some small way, to bear his burdens and walk with him through those final years.

That experience taught me something profound about the Bible’s vision of what it means to be human, something we might never figure out on our own, but something Scripture reveals to us about living under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

There is a beautiful catechism — not specifically Anglican, but belonging to the whole Church — the Heidelberg Catechism. It begins with this question: “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” And the answer: “That I am not my own, but belong — body and soul, in life and in death — to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.”

That is our comfort: that we belong to Him in life and in death.

What does it mean to live under the Lordship of Christ? It means saying, “This is hard. This is agonizing. But Jesus, You are Lord. You will walk with me, and You will walk with us through this.”

As the church, we do not leave sufferers alone. The Church, with our Lord Jesus, must say: “Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Come unborn child. Come child of war, violence, persecution, or poverty. Come persecuted believers. Come displaced people. Come you who feel worthless, useless, defective, or in total despair — maybe even tempted to take your own life. Come all of you with aching bones and fading memories. The church will hold your hand. We will feed you. We will sing over you. We will walk beside you. We will help bear your burdens.

So let us be the church that walks with the Marias’, through suffering, pain, and anguish, and display in our lives, through our bodies, to the world, the power of the risen Christ.