The Immortal Nicholas

by Glenn Beck

  As he carved, he prayed: “Forgive me for not knowing you were with me the whole time—Krampus understood that. I should have known when I first saw the infant Jesus, or when I heard his words at the well.”

  He began to shake and with a broken voice added, “I should have known at the cross! Forgive my stubbornness. Give me the water of life. I will drink!”

  The sky was darkening to purple when he realized that the figure taking shape beneath his agile fingers was Jesus. But this time, he wasn’t a baby. He was grown, God and man, triumphant in robes of white and holding high—in blessing, in welcome—his beautiful, nail-scarred hands.

  And Agios wept.

  Chapter 20

  Sometimes, transformation is quick. A rock dropped in a quiet pool disturbs the surface into ripples. An unexpected thunderstorm blows up out of nowhere in the middle of a sunny summer day.

  Sometimes, though, transformation comes slowly. It’s the air warming a little every day, pools of water forming on the surface of an icebound lake. Then drops cascade from trees, creating rivulets on cracking ground that become streams and rivers and rushing waterfalls. Brown grasses turn green by degrees, brightening as the sun warms the earth and coaxes buds to emerge from branches and turn their plump faces to the sun. The world becomes utterly different, wholly unrecognizable from the place it once was, and yet the process is always a surprise. To the sleeping heart, one day it is winter. And the next, spring.

  But it’s never that straightforward.

  How long does it take for us to truly understand? How can we look right past a simple truth that is plain to any child?

  Agios would continue to find his role. His metamorphosis would stretch over centuries, though its essentials were already set: He had a father’s loving heart and a strong man’s tender hands. The hard years had taught him perseverance, and he had always been generous. Others had seen it—Philos, certainly, and Gamos, Caspar, the others . . . Krampus. In the end, the last person to accept the truth about him was himself.

  Nicholas took up his studies in Myra, a town not too far from his birthplace of Patara. And because Agios was ready for a life beyond the isolation he had known for so long, because he knew that he was teetering on the edge of something so much greater than himself—belief!—he visited his young friend often.

  Several times a year, Agios left his cave and made the journey to Myra—a trek insignificant for a man of his stature and energy—and learned at the feet of his young friend, his new son. Agios couldn’t get enough of the stories and teachings of the man he so openly loved, for even the name Jesus was enough to bring a smile to his craggy face.

  “More,” he would plead with Nicholas. “Tell me more.”

  And the boy, who had grown into a man, obliged.

  Nicholas had other lessons to teach. When he became a priest, he felt keenly the need of the poor people of Myra, those the Romans spurned. Agios learned that Nicholas worked hard to learn of poor people who deserved help—and to give it to them. However, he gave secretly, never revealing himself. “Why?” Agios asked him once.

  “Well,” Nicholas said seriously, “I think that all good gifts come ultimately from God. It wouldn’t do for the messenger to take credit for his master’s work.”

  He recalled a mountain, and a distant figure in white preaching to a multitude. Give your gifts secretly and don’t seek glory from them. God, who sees all secrets, knows what you have done and will reward you.

  Oh, Agios remembered. All that became real one cool night. Agios had come in late on one of his trips to the city, and Nicholas, expecting him, had waited for hours to meet him near the gates. Then as Agios and Nicholas walked the streets of Myra, deep in conversation, they turned a corner and Agios felt Nicholas grip his arm above the elbow. “Look there,” Nicholas said quietly.

  Ahead of them in an empty lot, three people clustered around a small fire. They were poorly dressed—a man, a woman, and a little girl of six or seven. They leaned toward the warmth and the light of the humble fire they had built in an out-of-the way spot, a walled garden that had become overgrown with weeds.

  Something came over Agios the moment he saw them. All good gifts come from God.

  A voice, or just in his head?

  Agios reached into his pack and brought out a doll, one that he had cleverly fitted with joints so its limbs and head could move. Its eyes even opened and closed. He held it up so that Nicholas could see, and his friend smiled and nodded.

  Agios jerked his head, and he and Nicholas backed around the corner again. He knelt and placed the doll on the pavement, just where the girl might see it. As he began to rise, suddenly Nicholas bent and placed a little jingling bag of coins next to the doll. “They will need food and shelter as well,” Nicholas said softly.

  Agios stepped out. He wore the same red garment that Nicholas had given him years ago. He stood until the girl glanced up and saw him, and then he beckoned, pointed down, and then walked away, Nicholas falling into step beside him. “You wish no credit for your art?” Nicholas asked.

  “The only one who should know about it does know,” Agios replied. Behind them, he heard the man cry out in astonished delight. He felt warm and did not look back.

  “That was kind of you,” Nicholas said.

  “Son, you taught me that giving is a way of serving God,” Agios said. “I’d like to help you in your works of charity, if you’ll let me.”

  That moment changed everything for Agios. The next time he traveled to Myra he crammed as many trinkets as he could into his sack, along with dried goat’s meat, a bag of coins—the last remnants of the scholar-kings’ reward to him—a warm cloak he had traded for, as well as a sack of oranges that he had harvested from a grove a half day’s journey away.

  He told Nicholas, “I was wrong to think I could earn redemption.”

  Nicholas, now a middle-aged man and an honored priest, murmured, “No one can do that, father. God’s forgiveness is a gift.” He added warmly, “You of all men should surely understand the nature of a gift!”

  Agios sighed. “All those years I lived without hope, with guilt and bitterness boiling in my heart. I never paused to think of all the others who were even worse off. I could have helped so many times and didn’t.”

  “Hope,” Nicholas murmured. “That is the greatest gift you offer others.”

  Distributing the goods was a delight. Just as in the days when Agios left his carvings for children to find, he had the distinct pleasure of giving gifts without his recipient knowing the origin. A woman toiled over a pot of lentils and broth until Agios slipped past and there was suddenly—miraculously almost—mutton on her table. A young scholar walked home from classes, his head heavy and shoulders hunched until a perfect orange appeared on the ground before his shuffling feet.

  “They’re talking about you, you know,” Nicholas told him once.

  More years had passed, thought it felt like a mere season to Agios. A bearded Nicholas wore the robes of a bishop —red, like the coat that Nicholas had given Agios on the mountain, but a rich brocade, long and tasseled and trimmed in gold and white.

  Nicholas’s robes weren’t the only thing that had changed in the decades since Agios had first met him. Eudemus had been right: the emperor Diocletian had turned against the Christians with violence and the force of Roman law. In parts of the Roman Empire churches were razed, scriptures burned, Christians tormented and executed.

  “What do you mean, they’re talking about me?” Agios was going through his bag, taking inventory of what he had given and what remained to be distributed.

  “Your gifts,” Nicholas said, as if they should be past the point of pretending. “They say you’re a miracle, a saint, the hand of God himself. Some say you’re my uncle Nicholas, who was known for charity, come back to help the poor.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  His old friend laughed. “A red coat,” he teased. “They always see a flash of red after a blessing app
ears.”

  “Nonsense.”

  Nicholas said suddenly, “Other people think that it’s me.”

  Agios studied Nicholas’s red robe, the way his long beard had grown gray in the years since they had first met. When had his friend aged so? It sobered him to think that so much time had passed, and yet, he could see how the man he considered a son could almost be mistaken for him. “Does this bother you?” Agios asked.

  “I want no glory,” Nicholas said sincerely. “Let those who want to give thanks for bounty thank Jesus himself, the fount of all blessings.”

  “You are his hands and feet,” Agios said. “And my generosity springs from your well, my son. You inspire me.”

  For just a moment, Nicholas grinned like a child. It flashed across his face so bright and sweet that Agios felt his heart catch in his chest. “We are twins, you and I,” he said with a glint in his eye. “I know your secrets, Nicholas. I know about the dowries!”

  Nicholas laughed.

  “The story is on everyone’s lips. You threw three bags of gold through the window of a poor man’s house so his daughters wouldn’t be sold into slavery!”

  “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it,” Nicholas said with a shrug. “What is gold to me?”

  Now Agios was laughing. “They say it landed in stockings left before the fire to dry.”

  “My aim isn’t that good. Tales grow in the telling!”

  After a moment, Agios added, “Tale or not, you’ve started a tradition, you know. I hear children are hanging their stockings over the hearth in the hope that you may visit their house one night.”

  “Then we shall make sure they are not disappointed,” Nicholas said.

  They worked together whenever they could, distributing bread where bellies were empty and shoes where feet went bare.

  Nicholas’s reputation grew, and it wasn’t long before Agios himself felt humbled by the stories he heard. A boy, snatched into slavery and missing for months, appeared healthy and whole in his parents’ home, still clutching the golden cup he had carried for some faraway king. A storm was calmed, an innocent set free, there was food in the midst of famine. And through it all, Nicholas and Agios spread the name of the one who gave it all so that every tongue sang his praises: Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

  When the Romans imprisoned Nicholas, no one was much surprised. But though Agios’s heart ached, he couldn’t abandon the vision that he and Nicholas had so earnestly embraced. Agios redoubled his efforts. The man in the red coat was everywhere and nowhere: extending compassion, inspiring peace, spreading hope.

  One night, as Agios left a basket on the doorstep of a widow’s modest home, the door opened. Agios froze, waiting for her to shriek in alarm at this stranger standing on her doorstep. Instead, a smile broke across her face and she threw the door open to take his huge, rough hands in her own small, soft ones.

  “Is it you?” she whispered in awe. “Bishop Nicholas, is it you?”

  Agios ducked his head. “No. Just a friend,” he murmured.

  “Thank you!” she said. “Oh, thank you. I didn’t know if—I thought that with Bishop Nicholas in jail we had no hope.”

  Tears shimmered on her cheeks in the pale moonlight, and Agios was overcome with compassion for her. “We are Christ’s ambassadors,” he told her. “Bishop Nicholas and I, but you, too, my daughter. We are all his hands and feet.”

  She squeezed his hands and whispered a prayer of thanksgiving. And as Agios left, he glanced over his shoulder and saw that despite her own need, instead of carrying the entire basket into her own tiny house, she first took a loaf of bread and laid it at her neighbor’s door.

  Surely, it was the start of something beautiful.

  Emperors fell and rose. Constantine, more tolerant than Diocletian, and finally a Christian himself, took the throne. Nicholas was released from prison and given more honor than ever. Agios found his old friend thin and scarred, his face drawn and tired, but his eyes were still warm and bright.

  “What have they done to you?” Agios cried.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Nicholas said putting his hand on his old friend’s shoulder. “Scripture tells us everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. ‘We glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance character, and character, hope.’ ”

  Agios finished, “ ‘And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts.’ ” He searched Nicholas’s face. It was open and inviting, the sort of countenance that made you want to linger and listen.

  “Love is never safe,” Nicholas said. “It is always a danger, a great and beautiful risk. But I take it gladly, Father.”

  Father. Even now the word gave Agios a twinge of regret for the past—though he did love Nicholas as a son.

  Agios reached out and clasped Nicholas’s hand, drawing it to his chest where he could hold it tight against his heart. “And so do I, my son.” It was a covenant between them, a promise that all that had happened, everything that had come before, would pale in the glory of all that was to come.

  It was just the beginning.

  Chapter 21

  Sometimes death is a simple thing.

  Nicholas’s death was not.

  He was seventy-five years old and a bishop when his body began to fail. One day he struggled to read his scrolls and the next he listed to the side when he walked. It pained Agios to watch his friend deteriorate by degrees, but Nicholas accepted everything cheerfully.

  “I am an old man!” he told Agios. “And I have nothing to fear. My life is safe in Christ.”

  “I know, son,” Agios said. He carefully rolled up the scroll they had been studying and rose to put it away. Death was a topic he could hardly bear to discuss. It made him think of the ones he had lost—and reminded him that he would soon add another loved one to the growing list. It filled him with an emotion that he was neither comfortable with nor proud of: envy. When would it be his turn? When would he close his eyes and open them in the presence of Jesus? And Krampus? And Philos? His soul yearned for this above all things.

  One last secret remained between him and Nicholas, one truth that stood like a wall separating them. But why was he hiding? Nicholas was his dearest friend, his teacher and advisor. His son.

  “Nicholas,” Agios said, rejoining him at the table. “I must tell you something.”

  Nicholas’s eyes had drifted shut, but he opened them now and fixed Agios with a slow smile. “You have my attention.”

  “Have you—” Agios wasn’t sure how to begin. “Have you noticed anything different about me? I mean, compared to other men.”

  His laugh was still a joyful sound, though Nicholas wheezed. “Father, everything is different about you.” But the serious look on Agios’s face seemed to make him rethink his answer. Gently, he said, “You are set apart, Agios. I don’t know how or why, but you are not like other men. You are fast and strong, tireless. You haven’t aged a day since I met you when I was just a boy, yet I am now old and about to go home.”

  Agios was surprised. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I trust you, my father. I knew you would tell me in good time. And if you didn’t, I thought it wasn’t a secret for me to know. I asked you about it once, remember?”

  Agios did remember. Nicholas had still been a child then. One night as they sat together he had studied Agios’s hands and asked, “How old are you, Agios?”

  There was no answer for that. Besides he didn’t want to scare the boy. “As old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.” He paused and smiled. “I’ll tell you when you have a white beard of your own,” he said.

  Nicholas hadn’t pressed him further.

  “Agios,” Nicholas said gently, “my beard is now as white as yours.”

  “I was there,” Agios said in a rush, knowing that Nicholas would believe him, that he could finally unburden himself of his own bewildering story. “I
saw Jesus.” He touched his left cheek. “I got this scar when the Romans crucified him.”

  The tale came out over the course of days and Nicholas faded bit by bit. By the time they reached the heartbreak of Jesus’s crucifixion, Nicholas lay confined to his bed. Still, he would murmur his delight at certain parts of Agios’s account. And sometimes, Agios would use a cloth to wipe the tears that collected in his old friend’s eyes.

  “Such a gift,” Nicholas whispered. Agios had thought his friend was sleeping. His eyes were closed, his breath too shallow, too quick.

  “I’ve always thought it was a curse,” Agios said.

  Nicholas’s eyes flashed open. “God gives good gifts to his children,” he insisted. “We are all a part of the body; we each have a role to fulfill. Yours is remarkable.”

  “I never understood,” Agios confessed.

  Tenderly, the old bishop said, “Oh, Agios, I told you long ago. You are worthy, and God forgave you before you ever thought you needed it. You asked humbly and with a broken spirit and God heard your prayer and transformed you into a different man.”

  “Humble?” Agios asked, shaking his head. “Me?”

  Nicholas took his hand. “You’re the most humble person I know. The scars on your hands and your face were earned by serving others. Don’t you feel that your scarred heart was made whole the moment you gave your service to Christ?”

  “My son,” Agios said, clasping the aged hand. “I didn’t know! Not until you taught me— even when you were only a child, you showed me what it means to give without grudging, to live with love. Nicholas, I saw Jesus, but I never knew him—not until you showed me the way. How long does it take for a man like me to understand? Help me again. I once prayed that God would allow me to serve him until Jesus’s mission was through, but I don’t know how to do that.”

  Nicholas squeezed Agios’s hand with his frail fingers. “You need no help, my friend. How can any of us understand it all, the gift from that baby you guarded, from that holy man who died on the cross? It doesn’t ask understanding, but only acceptance. Your prayer has been answered. You’ve become a legend, a guardian, and a mystery.”