He Became Poor
Even though it’s just a short phrase, there are some big challenges to understanding what Paul means.
Like, first of all, the word “poor”.
Then, the word “became”.
“He” is not too hard, because that’s Jesus.
The first problem is when we think poor, we think about money. We might imagine Paul is saying that although Christ was rich, he became financially poor. But we need to think about that a little more deeply. There are many hints in this verse that he’s talking about something bigger than that. Like, for one, the fact that the way he was rich was not about money. Later when he says, he did this so that we might become rich, he’s not talking about our financial prosperity here and now either. So two times already he’s not talking about money. Then when he says how he did it in the next phrase—“so that you by his poverty might become rich”—we know he’s not saying that by his becoming financially poor we might be made financially wealthy.
Given all that, if we go back and look at the phrase “became poor,” we can expect that becoming poor is not primarily about financial poverty either, if the whole rest of the verse isn’t. But if it’s not, what is it about? It’s a way of describing his incarnation - his taking on human nature. Because for the Son of God to do that, you could say, that’s becoming poor. It’s really just a shorter way of Paul saying what he says in Philippians 2, when he tells Christians: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”
And you know, there’s a lot to think about and enjoy here, for sure. But before we lean into the word poor too much, and think about what it tells us about the incarnation, let’s make sure we know what we mean when we talk about the incarnation itself. In general, we know that we are saying: God the Son took on a human nature. “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14). Or, Hebrews 2:15: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death.”
But again, when you start to consider some of the concepts around that, it’s clear you have to think about this. Because really, we’re saying here is this person, God the Son, who has existed eternally and who has the complete divine nature in himself. And yet what’s happened is that, at a point in time in history, all three persons that make up the Trinity—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit—worked in unison to cause the human nature of Jesus to be united to the one person of the Son. While we say God became man, and that’s fine because the Son of God is God, it’s really only the Son of God who became man. This person, the Son of God, assumed human nature. And that’s why, as we look at Jesus, we say things like: he has two natures, but he is one person. And who is the person? The Son of God.
This takes some humility to say right, because there is absolutely no one like him in this particular way. When we think about a truth like the Trinity, what it means for God to be God, obviously we have to struggle to enjoy the idea of three persons in one nature—which is amazing. But when we think about the incarnation, what it means for the Son of God to be human, now we have to struggle to enjoy the idea of two natures in one person. Do you see the difference? The Trinity is three persons in one nature, and the incarnation is one person in two natures.
The reason I’m stressing this idea of one person, and trying to highlight who is the person is because it will help us understand 2 Corinthians 8:9 a little better once we get it. When you think about the incarnation, you need to understand that it wasn’t like there was this preexisting human person out there named Jesus that God the Son saw and decided to unite with. Like, he was looking down and thought, “Hey, that guy Jesus looks like he has potential, so let me unite myself with him and make him God.” That’s not what happened. We know that because he’s not two persons. He’s two natures. And there is a difference. Somehow God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was able to take a human nature that didn’t have any complete and independent existence on its own and yet was still a real human nature that included absolutely everything that human nature is, and unite it to the person of the Son of God. In a way where both natures could remain distinct—there’s not a new thing, a mixture—but at the same time be truly, truly united. So you can’t think of them as fused or separated.
We’re blessed because this is something Christians through the ages have tried to work at saying right, because there are a lot of ways we can get it wrong. Especially as we think about this word “become.” Paul says he became poor. Because if we think about how it is said—he was rich and he became poor—as meaning what we would normally mean, we might think, “Oh, he stopped being one and started being the other.” After all, that’s usually what we mean by the word become. But if that’s what Paul meant, that would actually be terrible. And impossible. Because Jesus is not part of God. He’s truly God. And if the Son of God stopped being God, then there would be no God. You can’t not have one person and still have God.
Let me quote: “Here’s something marvelous: The Son of God descended from heaven in such a way, that without leaving heaven, he willed to be born in the virgin’s womb, to go about the earth, and to hang on the cross, yet he continuously filled the world, even as he had done from the beginning.” You get what he’s saying there, right? He’s basically saying that the Son of God was not changed into the Son of Man. He didn’t give up one to become the other. That is not what we mean by the incarnation.
And so when you read “he became poor,” you can’t think that he stopped being rich. If he stopped being rich, that means he stopped being God. And if he stopped being God, there is no God. When you think about the incarnation, as one church father said, what’s happening is that “without ceasing to be what he was, he became what he was not.”
To understand what it means for the Word to become flesh, or for the one who was rich to become poor, Fred Sanders explains that there are two ideas you have to get right.
“When the Word became flesh, he didn’t morph from a to z. In fact, when the Son of God came to earth, he didn’t leave heaven behind and stop being there in order to be here. As Athanasius says, “he was not enclosed in the body, nor was he in the body but not elsewhere.” He stayed everywhere and added a special human locatedness to it; the everywhere is what must be true for his divine nature, and the human locatedness is what must be true for his human nature. On the other hand, when the Word became flesh, the Son of God wasn’t looking down from the ramparts of heaven at a human Jesus far below that he moved around like a puppeteer would. The entire human nature may be thought of as a special kind of instrument wielded by the Word, but it’s wielded from within as something that is as much his as your human nature is yours. Notice, by the way, that at all times we are talking about the entire human nature, not just the physical body.
You might say it this way: It’s no good thinking of the Son as departing from heaven and landing on earth, morphing from God to man on the journey. That assumes that the divine nature turned into the human nature. But it’s also no good thinking of the Son as operating a Mr. Jesus device by remote control from his distant control center in heaven. One is too close; the other too far. The first option would say goodbye to the Word, turning it into someone Jesus used to be. The second option would never make it all the way to the flesh, settling instead for a fleshy automaton. In neither case would you have the Word becoming flesh in the Christian sense. We need the real Word, really becoming real flesh: the Son of God as both fully God and fully human.”
And that’s Jesus. He was totally rich - according to the divine nature. And yet he became totally poor - He took on a TRUE human nature. And miraculously He's able to be BOTH AT THE SAME TIME.
