The Crossover

Pursuing justice while refusing to demonize

We just got back from a few days away outside a small rural mountain town. We decided to take, Fred, the wonder dog on this getaway. One day while I was mountain biking with the boys, Angela stayed back. While walking Fred, she stepped just a few feet off the dirt road in front of our AirBnB.

An older man, working on his property, stopped what he was doing, walked over to her, and sternly barked,

“Get off my property! You can’t walk your dog on private land!”

Not a “Hi, how are you?” Or a “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” Just some snippy short-fused outrage over who belongs where and who doesn’t.

Understandably, the encounter stayed with her that entire day. Later in the day, as I walked Fred past the same property, I noticed his wood chipper plastered with stickers of Nancy Pelosi, Jen Psaki, and Kamala Harris, each one defaced with degrading slogans. Apparently, this man was living in his own sad world filled with intense anti-democratic and anti-woman grievances.

Angela told me how small and uncomfortable the encounter made her feel. We were both unsettled and angry. I thought if I were to see him again, I’d need to make my feelings known.

One thing was clear, we needed a pause and re-set.

Of course, staying safe around unsafe people is a priority. At the same time, I also recognized how quickly I leapt to demonize that man. It wasn’t hard to surmise he was a misogynist, a racist, a bigot, and maybe he was. But the most obvious, humanizing way to perceive him was much simpler, this fella was unwell.

There we were, in a mountain valley of evergreen trees, a rushing river, wildflowers, birdsong yet his chief concern was protecting his property line from a woman walking a small dog. That’s not the behavior of someone whole or healed.

Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash

Encounters like this aren’t new to me. Growing up in rural Indiana, there were always tales of the reclusive old man down a private lane who might brandish a shotgun if you crossed the line. And in 2025 America there’s good reason to be extra cautious with all manner of emboldened bigotry these days, however that type of anti-social character has been around forever.

This relatively inconsequential incident immediately took my mind to one of my favorite Jesus stories.

In Mark 5, Jesus meets a shouting recluse, an unpleasant looking man who made all the neighbors nervous. The community tried to restrain him with chains, but he kept busting out of them. He was so mentally ill that everyone in that time and context simply wrote him off as demon possessed.

But Jesus approaches him in the most Jesus way. He didn’t attempt to restrain, control, exile, or demonize him. Instead, he asked a question,

“What is your name?”

The man replied, “Legion” - a name which would have immediately carried a serious association. Anyone in that time and place would have identified the name, Legion, with the Roman military. It was as if he was only capable of identifying himself with the system that had swallowed him—a violent system that taught him to hate, intimidate, and kill. Now cut off from the only community he knew, he was psychologically frozen holding all that trauma, and that identity connecting him to all those horrible memories. Ancient authors didn’t have the DSM-5 so they just referred to the diagnosis as demon possession, while today we’d call it PTSD. Either way, he was consumed by something destructive, something that blocked his liberation and healing.

I guess I don’t see much difference between that man in the graveyard and the woodchipper guy. And having worked with unhoused military vets for several years, I’ve seen first hand just how profoundly PTSD and other mental disorders can alter a personality.

I’ve studied this passage over the years and it never ceases to astound me just how many cultural & religious boundaries Jesus crossed over to be with this man.

Here’s a few…

• A pig farm? A Jewish rabbi had no business being near 2000 swine.

• The region of the Gerasenes? That was “the other side of the tracks,” occupied by Rome.

• A graveyard? The law made clear: stay away from the place of the dead.

• And a supposed demon-possessed man? That was the ultimate boundary.

Those boundaries were deal-breakers within Hebrew culture, but Jesus didn’t seem to flinch or even comment of the tensions.

Why? Why would he create space for someone so volatile, so disturbing, so unwell?

Of course, dangerous behavior shouldn’t be overlooked or excused. I’m not singing Kumbaya in the face of potential harm and cruelty here. Stuff has to be clearly named. Jesus never denied the severe damage that unjust systems cause. He confronts evil systems head-on, while refusing to reduce the people within those systems to their mental illness or their worst moments.

Systems can certainly be evil and ideologies can destroy. That’s quite clear. But people, and yes, I’m talking about people like Stephen Miller or Marjorie Taylor Green, they remain human, image bearers of the divine.

I know this is where many will draw the line. Trust me, my impulse is to demonize too. It feels so easy, too easy, to slap a dehumanizing label on the woodchipper guy. When the zone of my consciousness becomes flooded with the pressures of 10,000 injustices, all that callous bullying and division pressing down on my mind, how do I not slide into auto hate mode?

Again, naming harm and injustice will forever be necessary. Democracy, equity, and civic healing must be relentlessly pursued.

But there’s a line we must refuse to cross… reducing people to demons and chaining them down with our narratives, stripping away their divinely infused humanity.

Angela left that walk feeling small and it certainly didn’t sit well with us. But after some distance, deeper breaths, and processing, the invitation comes into view. Can I hold even the woodchipper guy in view of God’s mercy? This isn’t naivete and I’m not gonna excuse inappropriate or harmful behavior, but I will not chain him down with dehumanizing contempt. That’s just too easy.

When encountering the woodchipper guy’s of my life, I’m drawn to consider Jesus’ impractical inconvenient practice of crossing boundaries. Yes, Jesus stepped beyond all those Levitical laws, but even before that, he made a deliberate decision to cross over a lake. Permission from Jesus to break the law is cool, but that lake he crossed, which was the Sea of Galilee, is a metaphor for all my long conditioned assumptions, judgments, prejudices, and laziness to settle on hatred over love. When Jesus crossed over that body of water, he too had to navigate a storm.

I suppose we all have a personal impractical lake to sail over. And the water will always be at least a little choppy before arriving on the other shore.

If Jesus could sail through it and if he could step over such boundaries to be with that guy, maybe I can take a small step too, even if it’s just by remembering the reality that no healed and whole person behaves like this, and yet even in their unwellness, regardless of their level of insanity, they remain God’s cherished beloveds.