Our beloved holy Father Nicholas is, along with St George (and second to the All-holy Mother of God), probably the best-loved Saint of the Orthodox Church. His numberless miracles through the ages, on behalf of the countless Christians who have called on him, cannot be told.

    He was born in Lycia (in Asia Minor) around the end of the third century, to pious Christian parents. His love of virtue, and his zeal for observing the canons of the Church, were evident from his infancy.  From early youth he was inclined to solitude and silence; in fact, not a single written or spoken word of the Saint has come down to us. Though ordained a priest by his uncle, Archbishop Nicholas, he attempted to withdraw to a hermit’s life in the Holy Land; but he was told by revelation that he was to return home to serve the Church publicly and be the salvation of many souls.

    When his parents died, he gave away all of his inheritance to the needy, and thereafter almsgiving was his greatest glory. He always took particular care that his charity be done in secret. Perhaps the most famous story of his open-handedness concerns a debt-ridden man who had no money to provide dowries for his daughters, or even to support them, and in despair had resolved to give them into prostitution. On three successive nights the Saint threw a bag of gold into the window of the man’s house, saving him and his daughters from sin and hopelessness. The man searched relentlessly to find and thank his benefactor; when at last he discovered that it was Nicholas, the Saint made him promise not to reveal the good deed until after he had died. (This story may be the thin thread that connects the Saint with the modern-day Santa Claus, the man in episcopal red).

    God honoured his faithfulness by granting him unparalleled gifts of healing and wonderworking. Several times he calmed storms by his prayers and saved the ship that he was sailing in. Through the centuries he has often done the same for sailors who call out to him, and is considered the patron of sailors and all who go to sea.

    He was elected Bishop of Myra not long before the great persecutions under Diocletian and Maximian (c. 305), and was put in prison, from where he continued to encourage his flock in the Faith. When the Arian heresy wracked the Church not long after Constantine came to the throne, St Nicholas was one of the 318 Bishops who gathered in Nicaea in 325. There, he was so incensed at the blasphemies of Arius that he struck him on the face. This put the other bishops in a quandary, since the canons require that any hierarch who strikes anyone must be deposed. Sadly, they prepared to depose the holy Nicholas; but in the night the Lord Jesus and the most Holy Theotokos appeared to them, telling them that the Saint had acted solely out of love for Truth, not from hatred or passion, and that they should not act against him.

    While still in the flesh, he sometimes miraculously appeared in distant places to save the lives of the faithful. He once saved the city of Myra from famine by appearing to the captain of a ship full of grain, telling him to take his cargo to the city. He appeared in a dream to Constantine to intercede for the lives of three Roman officers who had been falsely condemned; the three grateful soldiers later became monks.

    The holy bishop reposed in peace around 345. His holy relics were placed in a church built in his honour in Myra, where they were venerated by throngs of pilgrims every year. In 1087, after Myra was conquered by the Saracens, the Saint’s relics were translated to Bari in southern Italy, where they are venerated today. Every year, quantities of fragrant myrrh are gathered from the casket containing his holy relics.

As an epilogue to the life of this holy bishop, St Nicholas, we might consider what Christian virtues he exemplifies. We can take him as a role model not only as a bishop and good pastor of Christ’s flock but also as a follower of Christ who can guide us on the straight path toward salvation.

First, and perhaps unfashionably in this culture, we note his concern for truth. The unfortunate incident at the Council of Nicaea reminds us that our passions can sometimes get the better of us and that zeal, even for truth, must be tempered by charity. “Speak the truth in love,” St Paul taught (Ephesians 4:15). However, we must still speak the truth for all that and in matters of faith we must insist that there is indeed truth and error, Orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The Christian truth of course that St Nicholas was defending is that God has come in the flesh, the Incarnation and it is fitting that his feast, therefore, should fall just before the feast of the Nativity of our Lord. Without this belief in the Incarnation no one could be saved, and that is a very serious thing to contemplate. We need God’s rescue mission in His coming to this world, united to our human nature and in the person of Christ the Logos in order to be rescued from sin, evil and death.

Interestingly this leads me to the second lesson that we can take from the life of St Nicholas. He not only preached God’s rescue mission in Christ but he also worked that out in practical terms by himself rescuing many, including notably children and sailors, from mortal and moral peril. Christian truth, Orthodoxy, that is not backed up by orthopraxy is useless.  It is salt that has lost its savour, dead yeast that will not make bread rise. The Creed therefore saves us through holiness. Salvation has to do with the saints and sanctification, not merely expertise in theology.  Saving truth is always personal and embodied, never merely theoretical and abstract.  If we have a Saviour we must also take care, like the Man-in-Red, St. Nicholas, to save others.

St Nicholas therefore stands, by his own example, for a holistic understanding of Christian truth, a truth that saves because it is immersed in and expressed by self-giving love. For this truth and this love we have good reason to pray, “Holy father Nicholas, pray to Christ our God that He may save our souls, Amen.”