12/08/2025
"The Peaceable Kingdom":
Edward Hicks, William Penn, Pope Leo and Jesus
A meditation for the Second Sunday of Advent
Edward Hick’s beautiful painting “The Peaceable Kingdom” has been on my mind all week, since I realized that this Sunday’s First Reading is one of my very favorite Bible passages. It’s from the Book of Isaiah and, for me, is one of the most moving of all readings in not only Advent, but the entire liturgical year. It is a foretaste of what God has in store for the world: “A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a bud shall blossom.”
Christians see this as a presage of the coming of Jesus, the Messiah. (Jesse is the father of King David, and Jesus is a descendant, through St. Joseph).
After these lines, Isaiah offers this hope-filled image of what the reign of God will be like: “Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the young lion shall browse together, with a little child to guide them.”
This is the image that the Quaker artist Edward Hicks used in his painting, “The Peaceable Kingdom” (1864), one in a series of several paintings he created on the same topic. If you look carefully, you can see all the animals mentioned by Isaiah in this scene.
In the background of these paintings, Hicks often placed an image of William Penn (founder of Pennsylvania) signing a treaty with the Lenni-Lenape people, who lived in Eastern Pennsylvania and the surrounding areas. (The artist Benjamin West painted this scene in a more formal way.) Hicks knew that William Penn would keep his peaceful treaty with the Native Americans, even if later Pennsylvanians did not.
I’ve also been thinking about William Penn and the Quakers (more formally, the Society of Friends) since I’ve been writing about them in my memoir “Work in Progress,” which takes place largely in a Philadelphia suburb called Plymouth Meeting, which was founded by Quakers. (The name comes from the Friends Meetinghouse, still standing, that was built by Quaker emigres of Plymouth, England.)
William Penn, who was kicked out of England for espousing “heretical doctrines," wanted Pennsylvania to be a “Holy Experiment,” where people from all faiths would live in peace. That included the Lenni Lenape. (Penn later said that the Native Americans treated him better than the English had.)
For me, this painting offers us, in a time of terrible division, discord and disunity, an image of what our world could be like if we tried to listen to one another, wish the best for one another, and live in peace with one another. Pope Leo XIV’s recent trip to Turkiye and Lebanon, where he met with not only Orthodox but Muslim brothers and sisters, also holds out that hope.
Whenever I see Hicks’ painting, I’m filled with a deep peace. But also a deep longing: for that Peaceable Kingdom, which Hicks and Isaiah, and most of all, Jesus hold out to us all.
