Father Thomas Welbers' Homily

I could not resist the opportunity given by this new screen to take the hint given us in the first reading, and show this picture as a backdrop for my homily. I suspect most of you have seen this picture before. It’s the “Peaceable Kingdom,” painted in the early 1800’s by American Quaker artist Edward Hicks. He painted many versions of this scene, based on the passage we heard in the first reading from Isaiah. He seemed to be obsessed with the promise of the prophet in which animals that are natural enemies of each other eat and play and live with each other, all in perfect harmony and safety, with a little child to guide them.

Is this merely a fanciful myth, an impossible dream? Notice in Hicks’ painting, the figures in the background to the left. It’s a scene of newly arrived European colonists, led by William Penn, making a treaty with the Native American Indians, so that they could all live together on the same land in peace and harmony.

Alas, as both history and our own experience of life today tell us, such peace and harmony always seems beyond our grasp. No matter what our good intentions and desires, conflict and violence, based on fear, misunderstanding and mistrust, always seem to get the upper hand.

Isaiah in his day was no naïve dummy. He knew that the wonderful promise in his prophecy was far from the reality he and the people of Israel were experiencing under corrupt and opportunistic kings and leaders. He could not see any change on the horizon; in fact he accurately predicted the invasion, defeat and exile of his people that would take place only a few years after he wrote this wonderful vision.

But Isaiah the prophet was not extolling the promise of human progress or political diplomacy. He found no hope in the prosperity and power that were so much a part of his society. The one hope that Isaiah was able to articulate was that real peace comes from God alone, not from human efforts. As much as we try to achieve peace, security, and harmony through even the best of human ingenuity, we still seem farther away from that goal than we ever were. Now, in this season of Advent, Isaiah is speaking from out of our distant heritage to remind us that real peace comes from God alone.

If this is true, do we just wait passively for God to give it, to do for us what we seem unable to do for ourselves? No, and here’s where the call of John the Baptist in the Gospel speaks to us. Repent, he tells us. That’s our job, repent – change our own lives, rather than trying to change everyone else’s! The peaceable kingdom can come into our midst, only if it comes from within our hearts, trusting in the power of God’s Spirit.

How do we do this? Here I’m reminded of a poster I saw about thirty years ago. I think Linus, with thumb and blanket, typifies our quest for security, and the gulf between our ideals – “I love mankind” – and our reality – “I just can’t stand people.”

Where are the resentments and biases in our own hearts that seek victory over peace? How can we put them aside, and clear a path for the Lord’s coming? Where are the fears and anxieties of our lives that seek security over justice? How can we face those fears and anxieties and not let them dominate us? Where are the hurts, unhealed and perhaps humanly irresolvable, that we can do nothing for except turn them over to the Lord?

It’s hard to look at these things. We can do so only with the courage that comes from grace. And that we get only by prayer.

This past week, in an audience with a society of Christians dedicated to serving the sick and the poor, Pope John Paul II said something that touched me deeply, and I think it’s right on target in our quest for peace. He said:

“Prayer illuminates the heart and makes it more disposed to accept suffering. And suffering, accepted with abandonment in God, opens the spirit to understand the pain of others.”

And perhaps that is the key – accepting our own pain as gift from God and thereby rising above it to understand the pain of others. As we pray in the second Eucharistic Prayer for Reconciliation, which we will pray in this Mass, it is only in power of the Holy Spirit that “understanding puts an end to strife,” that “hatred is quenched by mercy, and vengeance gives way to forgiveness.”

We can’t love mankind in the abstract until we tackle – with emotional health and integrity, and the support of one another – until we tackle the truly difficult task of discovering, prayerfully and sometimes painfully, how to understand and respond in love to each person God places in the pathways of our own lives.

© 2004 Thomas Welbers

See also the magnificent "Peaceable Kingdom" woodcuts by another Quaker artist, Fritz Eichenberg. (A much better image is found at the Episcopal Church Image Shop website.)