What do we need to be healed of? In this week’s reflection, John Falcone reminds us that God knows how to heal our wounds and hurts, and that this healing power is already at work in our hearts.

February 16, 2025: Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C‍

Jeremiah 17:5–8

Psalm 1:1–2, 3, 4, 6 1

Corinthians 15:12, 16–20

Luke 6:17, 20–26

God's Healing Medicine

A reflection by John Falcone

There’s a line in this Sunday’s reading from Jeremiah that will resonate strongly with many Americans: “The human heart is more deceitful than anything else, and desperately sick — who can understand it?” Some Americans will locate this sickness in the hearts of our current leaders and of those who support them. Others will locate it in the hearts of the “Trump-hating” opposition. Others will locate it in the worsening dynamics of polarization. Meanwhile, many of us in the LGBTQIA+ community (and beyond) will wince at encountering this scripture, because we have been told – often over and over – that there is something deeply wrong with our hearts, that we were born broken instead of being born good.

Of course, this passage from Jeremiah is not discussing “original sin;” that’s a concept that was developed many centuries later. Jeremiah is simply making an observation: we humans have serious problems that strike at the roots of our mental and spiritual health. When we feel threatened, how quickly we abandon mercy and compassion. When we feel that money, comfort, or entertainment are within easy reach, how quickly we lose sight of other people and their desperate struggle to fulfill basic needs.

The final line of reading from Jeremiah might sound like a warning of punishment: the prophet tells us that YHWH searches our hearts and probes into our minds, “to give to all people what their actions and conduct deserve.” But I think this is a message of hope. YHWH does search the heart and probe into the mind. Even if we cannot understand the deep roots of our heart-sickness, of the disasters that we keep creating, YHWH can see and understand them. YHWH is the ultimate diagnostician, and YHWH knows the medicine that can help set us right. If religious communities really are called to serve as “field hospitals of the soul,” YHWH knows what each patient needs – what each patient deserves to receive so that they might be healed.

Yet medicine does not always go down easy. The prescription that Jesus offers in this Sunday’s Gospel starts off sweet, but then seems to turn bitter – at least for some of the people who are part of his audience. “Blessed are you who are poor, hungry, and weeping; who are the targets of insults and hate. Rest assured; you will get what you need! But too bad for you who are rich, who are fixated on your own comfort, who are living high off the hog. Rest assured, you will soon lose it all.”

This is no surprise to the attentive reader of Luke’s Gospel: only five chapters earlier, we heard Mary, the mother of Jesus, proclaim similar words: “God has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, but the rich God has sent away empty!”

This gospel message is God’s healing medicine. It is hope for those of us who are targeted by illiberal nationalism and by others’ irrational fears. It is hope for those who are frightened by high prices, by rising violence, by breakdowns in the value systems and the community structures on which they have relied. It offers a better vision of life – sharing food so that no one goes hungry; creating spaces where people can cry and laugh, where they can speak truth to power, and where they can live with one another in tolerance and respect. It might seem easier, or even more attractive, to hold on to our own personal comfort; to cling to our sense of financial security; to insist that “I don’t want to know about it and I don’t want to change.” But the price of those comforts is the survival of others. What kind of life would that Devil’s bargain buy us in the end?

This week’s second reading, from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, focuses on resurrection: if “there is no resurrection from the dead,” “if our hopes in Christ are limited to this life only,” then our faith is truly “worthless” and “pitiable.” To my mind, this passage underlines God’s infinite power to heal. Paul insists that God’s healing reaches beyond what is visible and observable, beyond even death and the grave.

God’s healing power is fully present, right here, right now, and beyond. We can receive it in many different ways: by confessing that our hearts are created so beautifully, and are also so easily deceived; by praying for each other across all our differences; by repenting of know-nothing-ism; by opening our hands when strangers ask us for help.

We can begin to receive that healing power, by deciding to take our medicine.

John P. Falcone is a practical theologian religious educator and a practitioner of Theatre of the Oppressed (PhD Boston College). He has been a Dignity member for more than 20 years with close links to Dignity NY where he met his husband Matias Wibowo in 2005. He is currently the Ford Visiting Professor of Practical Theology at San Francisco Theological Seminary.