Blessed are the Poor; Must we be Poor?

From Tim's sermon on 6/6/2010: 'Money and the Woes of Jesus'

Luke 6: 20-23: "Looking at his disciples, he said: 'Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their fathers treated the prophets.'"

Tim's explanation:

He says 'blessed are the poor, the hungry, the greiving, and the excluded.' Now, what does that mean?

Now, some people say “It's simple, what it's saying here is Christians are people who seek those things, that's it.” But it's a little too simple. Not only does that not fit in with the way in which he spoke to people (he spoke to the rich young ruler, he said give all your money away; he spoke to Zacchaeus, and he was happy with fifty percent; other people, he never brought it up, even some wealthy people like Nicodemus.) If somebody takes that and says, “Jesus is saying you must not be successful if you're a Christian, you must not be popular if you're a Christian, you gotta be persecuted, you gotta be poor," it's difficult to square that with everything else in the Bible.

And besides that, I have to tell you, the few people who I've ever met who believe that...what would motivate you to say, “As a Christian I'm going to seek to be persecuted, I'm going to seek to be poor”? What would motivate you? One thing that would motivate you is pride, so that you feel noble, better than all those comfortable Christians. You're a real christian! Or, another motivation would be fear. I'm afraid of having things, I'm afraid of recognition, I'm afraid of success. Which means they're still, to some degree, controlling you.

Now, Jesus isn't saying that Christians seek poverty and seek persecution. What is he saying? You get a little bit of a hint of it when you try to compare the woes and the blessings. You know when Jesus says “woe are you who are successful”, "woe to the successful," ...what is he saying? He's saying: though success looks good on the surface, it really can be a source of terrible woe. So when he says 'blessed are you who are poor, blessed are you who are persecuted, blessed are you who are grieving,' he's saying the same thing. He's saying 'on the surface, these look awful, but they actually can be a source of blessing.'

[later...]

You see, the way you can tell the difference between a person who's in jesus' kingdom and a person who's in the world's kingdom is that...when the poverty hits, when the persecution hits, when the grief hits, it's not the end of the world, we can grow, we can deal with it, we can even value the experience of suffering, because we know it's going to produce something in us.

**********

My question: is that really all Jesus is saying? Tim almost makes it sound as if Jesus has no preference between the rich and the poor. But it's harder for the rich to get into heaven, right? (Matthew 19:24) And Jesus basically healed, spent time with, and entrusted his ministry to the poor, right? , Jesus pronounces judgment on those that fail to help the poor. (Matthew 25:41-45) Jesus even says, at one point, "any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple." (Luke 14:33) Tim's interpretation seems to be that poor versus rich is beside the point, and Jesus' true priority is the state of your heart with respect to God. Is he right?