Some prayers feel hopeless before they are even spoken. The need is too large, the situation too tangled, and our own track record too poor for us to expect much in return. We pray anyway, but we pray the way we drop a coin into a wishing well, without any real hope that anything will come of it.
Matthew 15:21-28 tells the story of a woman who prayed against impossible odds and walked away with everything she had asked for. She had every reason to stay silent, and once she started, every reason to give up halfway through. Yet she became the only person in the Gospels to hear Jesus say, "Woman, you have great faith. Your request is granted." Her story is a master class in praying when everything, even God himself, seems to be against you.
A Prayer Against Every Advantage
Jesus has withdrawn from Galilee to the region of Tyre and Sidon, pagan territory beyond the borders of Israel. These were wicked Gentile cities, named and condemned by a whole row of Old Testament prophets. And it is here, on the wrong side of every boundary, that a woman comes running after him.
Mark calls her a Syro-Phoenician, a simple geographic label. Matthew makes a far sharper point by calling her a Canaanite. The Canaanites were long gone by this time, destroyed in the days of Joshua. The word is almost an insult, chosen to remind us exactly who is doing the asking. She belongs to the cursed peoples, the outsiders, the bad guys of the Old Testament story.
And yet the Old Testament also whispers a counter-story. Rahab the Canaanite was spared because of her faith. A widow in this very region of Sidon was kept alive in the days of Elijah because of her faith. So when this woman appears, there is a sense of déjà vu. She seems to be seeking Jesus, but in reality Jesus has come looking for her.
Notice the barriers she has to cross. She is a woman, and she is a Gentile. To reach Christ she must climb over a wall of gender and a wall of ethnicity, what Paul calls the dividing wall of hostility. Humanly speaking, she is praying against the odds. Do you ever feel the same? You look inside, you see your sin and your unworthiness, and you wonder whether God could possibly want to hear from someone like you. This woman shows us the way. She lets none of it silence her.
The Shape of a Desperate Prayer
Listen to how she prays: "Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me. My daughter is suffering terribly from demon possession." In a single sentence she models how to bring an impossible case to God.
- She owns her helplessness. "Have mercy on me." It is the cry of Psalm 51, and it is always a good place to begin when you do not know where to begin. The word mercy admits three things at once: I am in need, I do not deserve your help, and you alone are able to give it if you are willing.
- She owns her Lord. "Lord, Son of David." A Gentile woman from Tyre confesses both the divinity and the messianic kingship of Jesus. How she came to such conviction we are never told, but her grip on the covenant promises puts whole crowds of unbelieving Galileans to shame. By birth she is a daughter of Canaan; by faith she is a daughter of Abraham.
- She owns her problem. Her daughter is held under the power of Satan and cannot bring herself to Jesus. Praying against the odds means praying for the thing that is completely beyond your reach. It may not be a demonised child for you. It may be a wayward son, a marriage in pieces, a diagnosis, a job, a friend who will not come. But it is a case you cannot fix, and the only place left to take it is to Christ.
Four Discouragements in Prayer
What happens next is one of the most troubling scenes in the Gospels. Jesus seems harsh, distant, even dismissive. But he knows this woman's heart, and he means to give her exactly what she asks. First, though, he will stretch her faith through four discouragements, the very discouragements we so often meet ourselves.
First, no immediate answer. "Jesus did not answer a word." You have prayed like that. Your words seem to hit the ceiling and fall back to the floor. But silence is not absence. As the psalmist cried, "O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer" (Psalm 22), and still he kept crying. Never measure God's hearing by the speed of his reply. Not answering is not the same thing as not listening.
Second, pressure to give up. The disciples want her gone: "Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us." There is always a voice urging you to stop, sometimes the voice of your own doubts about whether God really loves you. Faith refuses to be sent away. Paul tells us to pray "with all perseverance" (Ephesians 6:18), because it is never Christ who wants you to stop praying. It is the enemy. The weakest saint on his knees makes hell tremble.
Third, Christ feels like a stranger. When Jesus finally speaks, he talks about her to the disciples rather than to her: "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel." Have you ever known that strange distance, when the Lord's providence seems mysterious and even cold? His ways are past finding out, but what looks troubling from where you stand is wise and gracious from where he sits. Great faith clings to what it knows of his character, not to its own reading of his providence.
Fourth, Christ seems to say no. "It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs." It sounds like a slammed door. But it is a door left slightly ajar, and she sees the gap. This is the one time in Scripture where Jesus lets himself be caught in his own words, because he wants to be caught. He is testing her faith, and her faith wins the day.
Crumbs Are Enough
Her reply is breathtaking in its humility: "Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table." She does not storm off, offended. She accepts the lowly place and simply asks for a scrap, because she knows that a crumb from this table is more than enough.
And here is the quiet truth underneath the whole scene: all prayer is praying against the odds. By nature none of us has any right to ask God for anything. Every prayer is an act of begging, an approach made in profound humility by people who deserve nothing but judgement and yet come to a King who delights to give. This woman simply saw what is always true, and asked anyway. Her humility is the very thing that makes her faith great. The same posture runs through the prayer Jesus taught his own people, the cry of "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name", where we come not as those who have earned a hearing but as children depending on grace.
Let It Be As You Desire
Then comes the answer that makes the whole long ordeal worthwhile: "Woman, you have great faith. Your request is granted." The original is even warmer: let it be to you as you desire. Her daughter was healed from that very hour. The Puritan William Gurnall once observed that prayers are not long in travelling to heaven, but a full answer can be a long time coming back. The waiting had been real. It had also been worth it.
Notice the proportion. The size of the answer matched the size of the faith. Not because she earned it, for every answered prayer is pure grace, but because God is pleased to be sought, begged, asked, and even reasoned with before he pours out the blessings he had always intended to give. He is sovereign over both the goal and the road that leads there, and it is grace from beginning to end. The psalmist found that same shelter when he made prayer his refuge in a crisis, as we see in Psalm 5, and Paul learned it when his thrice-repeated plea was met with the promise, "My grace is sufficient for you".
Praying against the odds does not look at the odds. It looks at Christ. And if even Christ himself seems for a moment to be one of the odds, you pray to him anyway.
So what are you praying about these days? What is on your list that has been there for months, or for years? What case have you almost given up as hopeless? Bring it back. Pray against the odds, not because the odds are small but because the One you are praying to is greater than all of them. Like Job, you may have to say, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust him." And you may yet hear the Saviour say over your impossible request, let it be to you as you desire.
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