There Is a Balm in Gilead
Jeremiah expected an answer of hope, and got only wounds that wouldn’t close. Generations later, enslaved Christians sang back where the healing was finally found.
SCRIPTURE
Jeremiah 8:18–22; Jeremiah 46:11; Genesis 37:25; Luke 4:18–19; Matthew 11:28–30
Jeremiah’s question was not really a request for information.
“Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of the daughter of my people not been restored?” (Jeremiah 8:22). Gilead was a real place, known for a real thing — a resin harvested and traded there, associated across the ancient world with healing. Jeremiah’s contemporaries would have known exactly what he meant, and they would have expected the obvious answer: yes. There is balm in Gilead. There are physicians there. Everyone knew that.
Which is what makes the final question unbearable. If the medicine exists and the physicians exist, why isn’t anyone healed? Jeremiah isn’t wondering whether Gilead has resources. He’s grieving that his people remain wounded despite them — that the remedy everyone knows is real somehow isn’t reaching the wound. The lament isn’t that nothing exists. It’s that what exists isn’t enough for what’s actually wrong.
Centuries later, a community with every reason to share that grief took the question and sang back where the healing was finally found.
A song with no single author
“There Is a Balm in Gilead” is a traditional African American spiritual with no known author. Like most spirituals, it developed through communal singing and oral transmission rather than being composed at a desk by one person and claimed. Versions of its refrain circulated earlier in the nineteenth century, and the complete spiritual appeared in print in 1907, later arranged by the composer Harry T. Burleigh. No single author owns it. It emerged the way spirituals generally did — inside a community, carried and reshaped by many voices before anyone wrote it down.
That origin matters. This song took shape among enslaved Black Christians in the American South, whose worship was frequently surveilled or restricted by the very people who claimed to share their faith. Enslaved communities often held religious gatherings in secret, and those gatherings were themselves a form of resistance — spaces where enslaved people could worship, grieve, and hope on their own terms, out of reach of the people who controlled every other part of their lives. The spirituals came out of that world.
And what this community did with Jeremiah’s grief is a careful act of Christian rereading — hearing his unanswered ache inside the larger scriptural story that Christians believe reaches its answer in Christ:
“There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole; there is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.”
Where Jeremiah found resources that couldn’t reach the wound, this Gilead finally can. The name gets carried forward from the ancient lament and given a new answer. The healing Jeremiah’s Judah needed and didn’t receive is offered now, for the sin-sick soul, through Christ. Not a different question. The same question, answered.
Not gifted enough
The verses that follow do something quieter, and just as important.
“Sometimes I feel discouraged, and think my work’s in vain, but then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.”
“If you cannot preach like Peter, if you cannot pray like Paul, you can tell the love of Jesus and say he died for all.”
That second verse names a very specific fear: not being gifted enough. Not eloquent enough, not spiritually impressive enough, not the kind of person who belongs at the front of the room. The comparison to Peter and Paul isn’t random — they’re the two towering figures of the early church, the preacher and the theologian, the measuring stick anyone might reach for and fall short of.
The song doesn’t offer a pep talk about hidden potential. It moves the requirement somewhere else entirely. You don’t have to preach like Peter. You don’t have to pray like Paul. You have to tell the truth about what you already know — that Jesus loved people enough to die for them. That’s not a lower bar out of pity. It’s the actual bar. Anyone who knows that much has something to say.
For a community that had been told in almost every way available that they were less — by the very people who claimed to share their faith — this verse refuses the hierarchy of gifting the surrounding culture insisted on, and replaces it with the one thing no one could take from them: the truth about what Jesus did.
A balm for a real wound
A balm doesn’t deny the wound. You apply it because the wound is real, present, and still hurting.
This song doesn’t pretend suffering has already ended, and it doesn’t make peace with the conditions that caused it. It declares that Christ meets wounded people inside what has been done to them — and that the wound will not have the final word.
The singers were not claiming that faith made bondage acceptable, or that a song could substitute for freedom. They were confessing something harder to take from them: that bondage could not own the deepest truth about who they were. The Christ who heals the sin-sick soul is the same Christ who “anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor… to proclaim liberty to the captives… to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18). His healing begins inside real suffering. It does not stop there, and it does not ask anyone to be at peace with what caused the wound. It points toward a wholeness — and a freedom — that suffering does not get to finally prevent.
That’s a very different claim than “your soul can be free while your body remains in chains.” It’s closer to this: the same Christ who heals the soul is the Christ who came to set the captive free, and the hope this song sings is not a substitute for that freedom. It’s the refusal to let anything, including bondage, have the last word about who these people were before God.
For the discouraged and the ordinary
This song speaks directly to anyone who’s ever felt like their work doesn’t matter, like their faith is too quiet or too ordinary to count for much, like they’re surrounded by people who seem to have a gift for this that they don’t.
Its answer isn’t to convince you that you’re secretly extraordinary. It’s to move the requirement to the one thing every Christian actually has: the truth about what Jesus did, and an invitation open to anyone who is weary and heavy-laden (Matthew 11:28).
There is a balm in Gilead. Not a remedy that requires everything to be fixed first. A healing that meets the wound honestly, refuses to let it define the last word, and points toward a wholeness still coming.
Even this. Even you.
