So she did not even ask him.  She just stated her need, obviously expecting him to satisfy it without hesitation, let alone delay.  “‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon’.  But he did not answer her at all” (NRSV, Matthew 15:22,23).

So she went on repeating her request, and now her words had some effect – though not on him.  It was the disciples who spoke, and they begged him to do as she asked and to get rid of her because she was just making a nuisance of herself.  “Send her away”, they said, ”for she keeps shouting after us” (NRSV, Matthew 15:23).

At this, Jesus turned and reminded her that as she was not a Jew, she was outside the scope of his ministry which was restricted to the Jews.  “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (NRSV, Matthew 15:24).

But even those seemingly unsympathetic words, so unexpected from the gentle healer she had heard so much about, even those words did not quench her faith in his power to help her nor her hope that he would.

Yet the very delay and uncertainty served to bring home to her how greatly she depended on her daughter’s recovery and on Our Lord to bring that recovery about; and she now identified her child’s distress with her own.  She came and knelt before him and pleaded, “Lord, help me” (NRSV, Matthew 15:25).  That surely would overcome his strange unwillingness to make her daughter better.  Instead, she was met with an apparent rebuff.  “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little puppy dogs” (Matthew 15:26).