These thirty words sum up the meaning of Christmas as well as any in the Bible. Yet Paul wrote them as part of a very lowly genre, an appeal for money. He was trying to persuade the Christians in Corinth (which was a wealthy trading city) to send some of their bounty to the poverty-stricken Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. Paul, an educated Jew, knew better than anyone what it meant for Gentiles now to be graciously included in that story of renewed creation which had long been experienced by the descendants of Abraham.
So to make his point, Paul reminds the comfortable Christians at Corinth of the central Christian mystery. The "poverty" he describes is not Jesus' modest means as a traveling prophet, preacher, and healer. It is rather the poverty of the self-giving God who "emptied himself," whom we meet fully in Jesus, through whom (as Paul had written in an earlier letter) "all things came and through whom we live." Thus the "poverty" of Jesus is the love of the Creator whom we meet on the Cross, who makes us his image-bearing creatures—and who, through Christ and in the Spirit, is making us his new creatures.
"Drained is love in making full, bound in setting others free; poor in keeping many rich, weak in giving power to be."
(W. H. Vanstone)
