Mark 10:26

“Then who can be saved?” they exclaimed in the greatest astonishment.

looking on fortunate others
knowing our own plans
fractured and faded
we project consistency
in both directions

upward always and onward
those with the most more
have too much to fail
even their bankruptcies
bring advantages

with heaven already on them
how could they miss heaven’s mark
such a construct
simply doesn’t compute
we don’t get it

The disciples have been shocked before by Jesus’ actions, directions, and responses to them. It has not just been the crowds that have been amazed.

In the realm of such mysteries as parables, multiplications of bread, and various healings we can claim to be out of our depth and come to simply accept that which goes beyond our usual experience is foundational.

However, when it comes to the place where we swim, within an economic system, here we have enough immersion to have our foundations shaken. Here we think we know what we are talking about.

In the first part of Mark, σῴζω (sōzō, be safe/healed/saved) was present in some diminished setting of illness, possession, or nearing death. Remember the man with a withered hand, Jairus’ unnamed daughter, a hemorrhaging woman.

We are now well into the second part. Where once sōzō, salvation, showed itself in the giving and receiving of health and life, now sōzō shifts away from “salvation from death to salvation through death” (LaVerdiere-2₁₀₂).

The shift from preparing fisher-folk to go out with a staff and a cloak to find hospitable spots from which to radiate health has morphed into preparing their being to be hospitable spots from the non-attached spot of suffering, death, and next life.

This is the sort of quantum shift that more and more people are seeing as needed in this world—a next line and stage that a few will take in advance of additional people joining through time and setting out on whatever a next Axial Age will later be termed. This is more than a generational shift. An invitation to sōzō is on the loose.