What Came First?

This Sunday, the Gospel reading was from Matthew 15.

As I listened closely to Pastor read the words, one phrase caught somewhere in me.

Jesus called the Pharisees blind.

And almost immediately a question sparked:

Blind to what?

I wrote it in the margin. The reading continued, but the question stayed with me after the reading ended.

The Pharisees had challenged Jesus over purity.

They were concerned with tradition.

With what entered the mouth. With what had been touched.
With the practices that distinguished clean from unclean, faithful from unfaithful—
what belonged from what did not.

Jesus called them blind.

That caught me because blindness usually sounds like an inability to distinguish.

But these were people who distinguished very well.

Perhaps too well.

They had inherited an increasingly distinct vision of the world.

Clean and unclean.
Sacred and profane.
Faithful and unfaithful.
Insider and outsider.

And somewhere inside all that clarity, they had lost sight of something.

So the question stayed with me:

Blind to what?

And I wonder if the answer lies much farther back than Matthew.

Back before Pharisee and disciple. Before nation and covenant. Before the histories, traditions, boundaries, and identities by which human beings eventually learned to distinguish themselves from one another.

There is an older truth.

God created humankind in his image.

That came first.

Human. Made in the image of God.

Everything else came later.

That does not make what came later false.

The distinctions are real.

We belong to different peoples. We inherit different histories. We speak different languages. We practice different religions. We carry different stories, convictions, wounds, privileges, responsibilities, and ways of understanding the world.

Difference is real. But difference is not original.

And perhaps something happens when we forget the order.
When what came later becomes the first thing we see.

Matthew seems almost to test this immediately.

Jesus leaves his encounter with the Pharisees and travels into the region of Tyre and Sidon.

A woman approaches him.

Matthew does not simply call her a woman.
He calls her a Canaanite woman.

The distinction matters. It carries history.

She cries out because her daughter is suffering.

The disciples respond:

Send her away.

I keep wondering what they saw.

Perhaps they saw exactly what Matthew tells us to see.

Canaanite. Outsider.
Someone beyond the boundaries of the people to whom they understood Jesus to have been sent.

And the uncomfortable thing is that Jesus initially speaks within that boundary too.
He speaks of being sent to Israel. He speaks of children and dogs.

The distinction is not simply erased.

There is an old riddle about the chicken and the egg — which came first?

Genesis is interested in a different kind of answer.

Before everything humanity would eventually build around itself — nation, covenant, boundary, identity — there was human life bearing the image of God.

That came first.

And perhaps what comes later remains coherent only when it remembers what came before it, and what it was meant to carry forward.

Israel’s particularity was never only for Israel.

“In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed,”

God tells Abraham, generations before this road, before this woman, before this daughter’s suffering.

The boundary Jesus speaks from was never a wall built to keep blessing in.

It was a particular place through which blessing was always meant to move outward.

The woman does not pretend the boundary isn’t there either.
She meets Jesus inside it.
And continues.

She kneels.
She asks.
She persists.
Even the crumbs, she says, are enough.

And something becomes visible.

Not because she stops being Canaanite.
But because Canaanite is no longer sufficient to describe the person standing there.

There is a mother. There is a daughter.
There is suffering. There is love.
There is persistence. There is faith.

And Jesus says:

Woman, great is your faith.

That line feels even more striking because of what has happened just before it.

The religious leaders cannot see.
Peter still does not understand.
The disciples want the woman sent away.
And the person marked most clearly as the outsider is the one Jesus names as having great faith.

Maybe this is what blindness looks like.

Not an inability to see distinctions. An inability to see beneath them.

Or perhaps an inability to remember what was true before the distinctions ever arrived — and what those distinctions were always meant to carry outward, not guard.

I have thought before about the moral distance of distinct vision — about what happens when human beings become sufficiently distant that they become categories, populations, constituencies, workers, customers, voters, migrants, statistics.

But Matthew makes me wonder whether the movement can happen in the other direction too.

Perhaps distance does not always create abstraction.
Sometimes distinction creates the distance.

We learn the category first. Then the category tells us how near we must come.

Once someone becomes sufficiently other,
things that would trouble us if done to someone close can begin to feel reasonable.

Send her away.

It is such a small sentence.
And perhaps that is what makes it unsettling.

Nobody has to hate her. Nobody has to wish her harm.
They only have to know that she is not one of them.

The distinction does the distancing for them.

Yet underneath every distinction stands something older.

Image of God.

Perhaps this is not an argument for becoming blind to difference.
Maybe it is exactly the opposite.

To truly see another person should allow me to see their difference more fully, not less.

But there may be an order to sight.

If I see the image of God first, your distinctions help me encounter you.

If I see your distinctions first, they can begin determining how much of you I am willing to encounter at all.

One begins with communion and discovers difference.
The other begins with difference and decides the terms of communion.

Maybe that is why the question what came first? matters.

Because what comes first tends to become the lens through which everything after it is understood.

And Genesis gives us a strange simplicity beneath all the complexity that follows.

Before nation. Before tribe. Before doctrine.
Before class. Before status.
Before every boundary we inherited and every boundary we created.

Human.

Made in the image of God.

Perhaps the blindness Jesus warns about begins when we reverse the order.

When what came later becomes the first thing we see.

And perhaps learning to see again is not about erasing the distinctions between us.

It is simply remembering what was true before them—
and what the distinctions that followed were meant to serve.