http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/audiences/alpha/data/aud19880217en.html

"Jesus Christ Emptied Himself"

John Paul II.  --  General Audience — February 17, 1988

"To express this mystery of Christ's kenosis St. Paul also used another phrase: "He humbled himself." . . . Here Christ's kenosis is described in its definitive dimension. From the human point of view it is the dimension of the self-emptying by means of his passion and cruel death. From the divine point of view, it is the redemption effected by the merciful love of the Father through the Son, who freely obeyed out of love for the Father and to save humanity. In that moment there was a new beginning of God's glory in human history, the glory of Christ, his Son made man. The Pauline text says, "Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name" (Phil 2:9).

Commenting on this text of the Letter to the Philippians, St. Athanasius says, "This expression, 'has exalted him,' does not imply that the nature of the Word was exalted. The latter has been and always will be equal to God. It indicates, however, the exaltation of human nature. These words, therefore, were uttered only after the Incarnation of the Word, so that it would be clear that terms such as humbled and exalted refer solely to the human dimension. In fact, only what is humble can be exalted" (Athanasius, Adversus Arianos Oratio I, 41). Here we shall add merely that the whole of human nature, all humanity, humiliated in the painful condition to which it has been reduced by sin, finds the source of its new glory in the exaltation of Christ the man."

GREAT! Isn't it?

I thought this was very helpful.

See the bookend symmetry? The exaltation at the end points to what the reason for it was that had happened before: "only what is humble can be exalted." And it was not the divinity of the Son, nor the "Person" of the Son that was exhaulted, as neither of those would provide any remidee for us. But it was the Son's humanity, hypostatically his own, that having been humbled unto death, beyond what any other human would endure, yet as his own proven uncrushed by his death and resurrected, it was this that held remedee for us. But only after his passion "in the days of his flesh."