Catholic Radio Dramas

The Strength of Love

SAINT NICHOLAS ARCHBISHOP OF MYRA (d. c. 350)

From a Treatise on John by Saint Augustine

The strength of love ought to overcome the fear of death.

When the Lord asks Peter if he loves him, he is asking something he already knows. Yet he does not ask only once, but a second and third time. Each time Peter’s answer is the same: You know I love you. Each time the Lord gives him the same command: Tend my sheep.

Peter had denied Christ three times, and to counter this he must profess his faith three times. Otherwise his tongue would seem quicker to serve fear than love, and the threat of death would seem to have made him more eloquent than did the presence of life. If denying the shepherd was proof of fear, then the task of love is to tend his flock.

When those who are tending Christ’s flock wish that the sheep were theirs rather than his, they stand convicted of loving themselves, not Christ. And the Lord’s words are a repeated admonition to them and to all who, as Paul writes sadly, are seeking their own ends, not Christ’s.

Do you love me? Tend my sheep. Surely this means: “If you love me, your thoughts must focus on taking care of my sheep, not taking care of yourself. You must tend them as mine, not as yours; seek in them my glory, not yours; my sovereign rights, not yours my gain, not yours. Otherwise you will find yourself among those who belong to the ‘times of peril,’ those who are guilty of self-love and the other sins that go with that beginning of evils.”

So the shepherds of Christ’s flock must never indulge in self-love; if they do they will be tending the sheep not as Christ’s but as their own. And of all vices this is the one that the shepherds must guard against most earnestly; seeking their own purposes instead of Christ’s, furthering their own desires by means of those persons for whom Christ shed his blood.

The love of Christ ought to reach such a spiritual pitch in his shepherds that it overcomes the natural fear of death which makes us shrink from the thought of dying even though we desire to live with Christ. However distressful death may be, the strength of love ought to master the distress. I mean the love we have for Christ who, although he is our life, consented to suffer death for our sake.

Consider this: if death held little or no distress for us, the glory of martyrdom would be less. But if the Good Shepherd, who laid down his life for his sheep, has made so many of those same sheep martyrs and witnesses for him, then how much more ought Christ’s shepherds fight for the truth even to death and to shed their blood in opposing sin? After all, the Lord has entrusted them with tending his flock and with teaching and guiding his lambs.

With his passion for their example, Christ’s shepherds are most certainly bound to cling to the pattern of his suffering, since even the lambs have so often followed that pattern of the Chief Shepherd in whose one flock the shepherds themselves are lambs. For the Good Shepherd who suffered for all mankind has made all mankind his lambs, since in order to suffer for them all he made himself a lamb.

Source: The Liturgy of the Hours – Office of Readings

 

 

Saint Nicholas (d. c. 350) was born wealthy parents at the sea-port town of Patara in Lycia (Turkey). In his youth, he made a pilgrimage toJerusalem and Egypt. He developed exercises in devotion, penance and perfect obedience. He fasted of Wednesdays and Fridays and devoted himself to a religious life in the monastery of Holy Sion, near Myra. There he was appointed abbot by the archbishop, its founder and became known for his holiness, zeal, and numerous miracles.

Nicholas was imprisoned for his faith during the persecution of Christians under Emperor Diocletian. He was present at the Council of Nicaea where he denounced Arianism.

When three poverty-stricken young virgins whose father was about to turn them into prostitutes since he could not afford a dowry for them, Nicholas on three consecutive nights threw bags of gold into their house providing a dowry for each, who were then happily married.

Nicholas, the abbot, was later chosen as archbishop of Myra, the capital city three miles from Patara. He was known for his piety and a number of extraordinary miracles. He destroyed pagan temples and forced a governor, Euthathius, to admit he had been bribed to condemn three innocent men to death. Nicholas appeared in a dream to Emperor Constantine to tell him that the men were innocent. Constantine freed the men the next day. It is reported that he saved a number of doomed mariners off the coast of Turkey.

Saint Nicholas died at Myra and was buried in his own cathedral. His relics were confiscated by merchant seamen from Naples, who carried them off in their ships and brought them in 1087 to Bari, a town located on a peninsula in Southern Italy, in 1087. There, they were deposited by the archbishop in the Church of St. Stephen. On the first day, thirty persons were cured of various diseases. From that time the tomb of St. Nicholas of Bari has been famous for pilgrimages. St. Nicholas is known as a patron saint of children because he was from his youth a model of innocence and virtue. His relics are preserved in the church of San Nicola in Bari. Even to the present day a holy oil, known as Manna di S. Nicola, which is highly valued for its medicinal powers, continues to flow from the relics.

Source: Butler’s Lives of the Saints; Dictionary of Saints, by John J. Delaney, Doubleday & Company, NY 1980