When Love Crosses the Line

When Love Crosses the Line

Practicing Resurrection at the Boundaries

August 16, 2026

Rex McKee

In the name of the creator, who continually invites us beyond the boundaries of our fear and discomfort into the widening embrace of Jesus’s justice and love.

“To live outside the law, you must be honest.”
— Bob Dylan, Absolutely Sweet Marie

Blond on Blond, released in June of 1966, the summer of my high school graduation.

I have long been curious about what Dylan meant by that line. As a TA in 1969 I taught a course on the poetics of Dylan, Ginsburg and the prophets..  I suggested the connection that in some way Blond on Blond is a response to the 1965 classic Desolation Row. but that is for another time.

Placed alongside the song’s images of railroad crossings, locked doors, missing keys, prisons, and boundaries, it suggests something deeper than lawlessness. It points toward those moments when honesty requires us to look beyond rules, customs, and expectations and ask a more difficult question:

What is love asking of us now?

Scripture repeatedly shares these encounters with God at precisely such boundaries. Moses meets God in the wilderness. Jacob wrestles with the Holy One beside the Jabbok. Bethlehem lies in occupied territory. Golgotha stands outside the city wall. Eden has a gate. Sinai is a wilderness. Again and again, God appears where our familiar maps begin to fail.

 

Jesus lives within this tradition. He eats with sinners, touches those considered unclean, crosses ethnic and religious boundaries, and challenges the human structures that have accumulated around God’s law until they obscure its deepest purpose: mercy, justice, and love.

Dylan’s lyric echoes a profoundly biblical insight: beyond the boundaries of convention and certainty, the only faithful way forward is radical honesty before God, our neighbors, and ourselves. It is often at the threshold—where the gate is closed, the key is missing, and the path is uncertain—that we encounter the God who is always inviting us into a larger freedom

Isaiah makes this startlingly clear: “Maintain justice and do what is right.” Then comes an extraordinary expansion of Israel’s imagination: foreigners will be welcomed to God’s holy mountain, “for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”

Israel’s experience of exile—of becoming strangers themselves—had enlarged their understanding of God.

Their experience had become revelation.

Jesus travels to the region of Tyre and Sidon, where a Canaanite woman approaches him seeking healing for her daughter.

She crosses every line.

She is a woman approaching a male teacher. She is ethnically and religiously outside Jesus’ community. She probably did not speak their language or dialect well, her dress might have been different, her religion was probably not the same if she followed any tradition, she was poor and in the story begging…. She risks rejection and humiliation.

Yet her love for her daughter is stronger than her fear.

But there is another risk in this story.

Jesus stays in the conversation.

He listens. He allows himself to be encountered. He allows the persistence and courage of this remarkable woman to become part of the unfolding revelation of God’s kingdom.

That matters because genuine encounter always carries risk.

Whenever we truly listen to another person, we risk having our assumptions challenged. Whenever we accompany, walk with, someone whose life is different from ours, we risk discovering that God’s grace was already there before we arrived. Whenever we open ourselves to love deeply, we risk being changed.

The Gospel is not merely about believing the right things. It is about becoming people willing to cross boundaries in order to love.

And that brings this Gospel story uncomfortably close to home.

Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance offers a disturbing mirror. Set largely during India’s Emergency of 1975–1977, the novel follows Ishvar and Om as the settlement where they live is bulldozed in the name of government “beautification.” To be clear, these settlements were vacant lots that were taken over by homeless people, and built from the scraps of tin, wood, and cardboard they could find.

Under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, civil liberties were suspended, the press was censured, political opponents prisoned, and aggressive campaigns of slum clearance and population control became instruments of social order. Mistry asks what happens when poverty ceases to be seen as a human crisis demanding justice and becomes instead a beautification project removing undesirable neighborhoods and buildings from sight.

Consider the comparison between A Fine Balance and the clearing of homeless encampments in Saint Paul or Minneapolis. The bulldozing of the characters’ settlement occurs in the context of the Emergency’s campaign to impose order, modernization, and “beautification.”

There’s also an important irony in Mistry’s title: the “fine balance” is between hope and despair, dignity and degradation, individual agency and overwhelming political forces. The Emergency becomes Mistry’s historical laboratory for asking what happens to ordinary human beings when a government leadership decides that social disorder can be solved by making vulnerable people disappear from sight.

The parallel with Saint Paul’s August 5 closure of the Pig’s Eye Park encampment is not exact. The city reports outreach and serious safety concerns. Yet the moral question remains:

Are we ending homelessness, or are we moving homeless people somewhere else?

A compassionate city cannot measure success simply by whether tents and shopping cart homes disappear. We covenant to ask whether the people who lived in them have somewhere safe and dignified to go.

Perhaps this is where Isaiah, the Canaanite woman, Dylan, and our own city meet.

Our traditions, laws, institutions, and boundaries matter. But Scripture continually asks whether they are helping us love more deeply—or whether they have become walls that keep love out.

Jesus does not abolish the law. He reveals its heart.

Jesus’ resurrection becomes the ultimate crossing of boundaries. To follow the risen Christ is to practice resurrection: to cross boundaries, practice justice, accompany those pushed to the margins, and risk being changed by the people we encounter.

Perhaps that is what Dylan was reaching toward.

To live outside the law is not to live without accountability. It is to discover that rules alone are never enough. Love becomes our deepest covenant.

 

Or, as BB King and Bono preaches…in When love comes to town….

I was there when they crucified my Lord
I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword
I threw the dice when they pierced his side
But I’ve seen love conquer the great divide

When love comes to town, I’m gonna catch that train
Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down
But I did what I did before love came to town

 

That is where the Church is called—not at the center of our comfort, but at the edges where strangers become neighbors, enemies become friends, and where our not in my back yard comfort zone gives way to beloved community.

Every time love crosses another line, the reign of God becomes visible. Every time we allow ourselves to be transformed by such an encounter, we are practicing resurrection.

The Reverend Rex McKee

(u2-Eucharist: Rev. Paige Blair, Sarah Dylan Breuer, 2003)

10am Service