What do I want?

Homily

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time A2

26 July 2026

St. Ann Catholic Church - Prairie Village, KS

AMDG

What do I want?

Add this to the list of terrifying questions.  I've preached on them quite a bit.  Father, how are you?  Father, how can I help you?  Father, what are you afraid of?

They're all terrifying if you don't know the answer.  Add today's pivotal question to the list.  What do I want?  Does anybody really know the answer to this question?  If not, add it to the list of terrifying questions that we would rather avoid than answer.  

What do I want?

Why is this such a pivotal question for people of faith?  Because God asks it constantly.  It's the question asked of Solomon in a dream in today's first reading.  What do you want?  It's the question Jesus first asks his disciples in the Gospel of John - what are you looking for?  Jesus tells his disciples over and over and over - ask for whatever you want and it will be done for you!

The problem is that I don't know what I want!  The question is terrifying because if God is good and wants to give us good things, it's a question we can't afford to get wrong.  What if I ask for the wrong thing?  What if I ask for nothing compared to the everything God wants to give me?  

What do I want?  I want to be left alone and not asked this question! That's what I want!

In light of the Koester family's accident this week, a lot of us would ask for more protection.  It's a dangerous world out there, fraught with all kinds of evils.  Many of us would pray for safety.  It's not a bad prayer, yet we also know it's not ultimate.   Jesus embraced the worst evil happening to the most innocent person.  The cross teaches us there is something greater to ask for than preservation of our bodies.  

Many of us would ask for more comfort, for life to get easier.  Yet we know this isn't right either.  The hardest tough somehow becomes the best stuff, the most pivotal and transformative parts of our story.  We are not made for comfort, but greatness.  

The saints knew what to ask for.

Mother Teresa asked to thirst to hear the cries of the poor.

Thomas Aquinas asked not for intellectual gifts but only Jesus Himself

Solomon asked for an understanding heart.

The Blessed Mother asked for God's will processed through a pure and pierced heart.

St. Paul asks for the theological virtues - faith, hope and love. 

John of the Cross asked for suffering.

John Paul II asked to totally belong to Mary.

The list goes on and on and on.  Every saint could answer this question.  If I'm not a saint yet, I still don't know and the question terrifies me.  The parables of Jesus teach us that we get to will and choose and desire only one thing, and that is what we will receive.  It's too much pressure! And yet it's a choice we are born to make, a risk of faith that is salvific for those who make it.  It's the heart and most pivotal and dramatic moment of our story.  Our answer to the question - what do I want?

Jesus taught us to pray the 7 petitions of the Our Father, and told us that the Father will give the Holy Spirit to whomever asks.  In the Holy Spirit, we get 7 gifts in one - wisdom, understanding, knowledge, counsel, courage, fear and awe.  

In the Holy Spirit we get everything, and to ask for anything else or less is nothing.  

I desire the will of God which is to have the Holy Spirit dwell richly in me.  The will of God is to give the Holy Spirit so that I will always know what to ask for.

What do I want?

+mj