NOTES for Co2 4:8-9

For Paul, Christian ministry and the Christian path are inseparable from the idea of poverty understood in a Christian sense. The idea of poverty was already connected with the path of righteousness in the preaching of Isaiah of Jerusalem, eight centuries before Christ came. By the time of the Gospel, this connection was already seen as traditional: poverty and righteousness were synonyms.

Naturally, poverty was understood here not as a material condition, but as a spiritual state. Even a person who was materially quite well off could feel poor before God. The issue was not wealth or poverty, but the degree to which a person was ready to rely on God or on his own wealth.

A poor person in the spiritual sense became such when he realized that his life was bound up with God's presence, that the path of righteousness is unthinkable apart from His presence, and that the person himself cannot help himself in this regard by anything of his own. Everything a person has brings him no closer to God, and what does bring him closer is not in his possession; he can only receive what is needed from God, if God wills to give it to him. But what is received from God must be kept, and here much depends on the person himself.

This is exactly how the path of righteousness was understood in some rabbinic schools of Gospel times, as well as in earlier eras. And the Savior's words about the blessedness specifically of the poor confirm the truth of this understanding of righteousness. The Kingdom can be found only in this way, only by this path. It cannot be either earned or obtained by one's own strength, but it can be received and kept. Or lost, if one is spiritually careless.

That is why the apostle speaks of "earthen vessels," which have no value in themselves: only the contents are valuable, not the vessel itself. And poverty carried through to the end is death to the world in Christ. A person has died to this world; in this world he is nothing. But the life of the Kingdom is revealed in him more fully the less he is "alive" from the point of view of the untransformed world. And the more such people there are in the Church, the more fully she reveals herself to the world as the body of Christ - what she is meant to be according to the design of her Founder.