God, the Poor, and Being Confronted by the Teaching

"Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God. " Luke 6:20

I've been aware of the fact that God's most cherished people were the poor and the downtrodden ever since I was a kind, but I've never quite understood just why this is so. Why would God cherish these people the most? Why were these - the poor, the orphan, the widow, outcast, hunger and sick so Blessed? I think even people who are poor may not grasp the meaning of their being blessed - thinking of their unfortunate situation as a cruel joke from an invisible bully in the light of this passage. I once thought it was because they saw so much strife in their time on earth that they would be rewarded in the hereafter. Yet that comes back to the cruel joke thing again.
Recently I think I've seen a way better to understand the blessed life of the poor, it's not something particularly new at all - but it is an interesting revelation to nonetheless. This revelation stems from a famous saying from the Kamakura (1185-1333) period founder of the Jodo Shinshu, Shinran Shonin (1172 - 1262) that goes:

"Even a good person can enter the pure land, how much more so a evil person!"

It wants to be read with the bad person first and the good person last, but the insight of Shinran's thought shows the truth of entrance into the pure land to be opposite of what we want to think. How is it so that it is easy for a evil person('evil' is a pretty strong adjective, but it refers to you and I - we are beings deeply caught in the evil of our delusions and bound to our timeless history of karma, according to pure land doctrine of course) to attain birth in the pure land. To Shinran birth was attained by faith alone, faith that the working of the vows of Amida (the Buddha who created and presides over the pure land) that say all beings will be brought to the pure land in the next life to achieve enlightenment there. To have total faith in the working of the vows, one must cease any striving for enlightenment or birth in the pure land on their behalf and let the vows do their thing of saving beings - because to anything by oneself is to not have faith in the working of the vows. In the eyes of Jodo Shinshu doctrine, the only person truly capable of such faith is the evil person, or someone who has come to acknowledge their own foolishness. Knowing their own depravity, holding no pretense to goodness and are aware that striving for enlightenment or birth through ones own means are rooted in an ego-centered, utterly futile sense of gain: "I WANT to be born there so I can attain enlightenment and be GREAT! Whereas those who consider themselves can to be good are not seeing the whole truth of their deluded and foolish state - any attempt to be a good person or create good by one's own means is still grasping blindly at ideals and is thus still creating more suffering for oneself and everyone else.

I think you can see where I can going with this explanation of pure land doctrine. The blessed nature of poverty is the freedom from the pretenses held by those who are swayed by material things and the self-aggrandizement that comes with addiction to wealth and material. Poverty shows man the futility of his pretenses to goodness and allows a person to put total faith in God, knowing deeply in their heart that they can't bring salvation on themselves.
Eihei Dogen (1200-53) was a contemporary of Shinran, he is renown as the founder of the Soto Zenshu and oft touted as Japan's most profound thinker and writer. He's a personal favorite of mine. He once wrote:

"Teaching that does not sound as if it is forcing something on you is not true teaching."

I'm not particularly sure where this quote came from, but I thought it was really profound in it's universality. If a teaching isn't poking a hole in your reality - if it's not confronting you in some way, it's not doing much more than reifying your ideals, it doesn't let you learn anything new. That can be taken for any aspect of life I think. I know that the pure land teaching has really confronted me in interesting ways. I was once offended and confused by the use of such belittling terms as evil or foolish deluded being because I was so stuck in this psuedo-Zen ideal that everyone was good because of their Buddha-nature. Really, Zen says we are just as deluded and foolish, but whenever we here about foolish beings and Buddhas, Zen students often fancy themselves of the Buddha's side and not the fool's side, which is just a matter of pride to be worked out. It also managed to help me understand the sentiment of Kodo Sawaki Roshi, a famous Soto Zen master in Japan, in his saying:

"gaining is delusion, losing is enlightenment."

As well as the similar insights of Dogen's works the Shobogenzo and the Eihei Koroku. I think to Christians, seeing that God deeply cherishes and blesses those who are poor with ability of great faith and his kingdom may make them wonder about all of wealth and material as well as fame and celebrity they profess to be blessings from God. Does God shower these gifts as incentives to show up for church on sunday and pay attention to bible study? Or is there something more to this 'being blessed'?

So what teaching forces something on you?