Annotation CLI

”There was a certain beggar, named Lazarus.” — Luke 16:20

Whether those who preceded the preaching of Christ hoped for the resurrection.

Chrysostom, in the first sermon on Lazarus, not far from the end, asserts that Lazarus could hope nothing concerning the resurrection: because those who preceded the time of evangelical grace had no knowledge of the resurrection. And he expresses this in these words:

“I can add yet another [thing] to all these — namely, that Lazarus could not even reason anything about the resurrection; but he believed the affairs of this life to be bounded by the end of this life. For he was of the number of those who preceded the grace of the gospel. But if now, in these times — after so great a knowledge of God, after the excellent hopes of resurrection, after the punishments there laid up for sinners, after the goods prepared for those who have lived rightly — there are some so cast down in mind, and wretched, that not even by the expectation of these [things] are they corrected: what, in fine, must be thought to have befallen Lazarus, destitute even of this anchor? For he could never reason any such thing, because the time of such doctrines had not yet come.” You have an observation akin to this passage above, in Annotation 51 of this book.