We love to determine who is best.
Simply ask any kid to race, or look at our most watched program, the Super Bowl, as evidence of our obsession with competition and winning.
And this desire to discern precedence extends well beyond the world of sports. For we possess a seemingly insatiable need to define our place in the hierarchy and are therefore constantly evaluating ourselves against others and assigning priority.
However, to accurately assess others in a case-by-case basis is extremely time consuming. Thus we grossly oversimplify them and place them in broad categories to to expedite the process. In this reductive operation however, we lose the human beings around us and focus on our minor differences vice our overarching consensus.
“Don’t, by the way, read too much into the differences here between men and women. Neither man nor woman can go it alone or claim priority. Man was created first, as a beautiful shining reflection of God-that is true. But the head on a woman’s body clearly outshines in beauty the head of her “head,” her husband. The first woman came from man, true-but ever since then every man comes from a woman! And since virtually everything comes from God anyway, let’s quit going through these “who’s first” routines.”
As Paul wisely points out, it is not about one group or the other’s precedence, but God’s precedence. For everything flows from God, so can any of us rightly claim responsibility for the blessings we have received? Otherwise put, let us abandon our futile efforts to justify our own importance and instead expend our energies on something eternally meaningful: loving others.
We can’t do this life alone. We need each other. Our differences don’t make us better or worse, but expand our collective coverage. For we are ultimately far greater together than we can ever be alone. Let us not bicker and undercut eachother then, but join together.