Platanos

A friend of mine gave me two plantains when I saw her on Wednesday. We were sitting together at a lunch for Pastors and leaders in ministry, and she had extras from her food pantry distribution that morning. Her family is from Puerto Rico and she lives on the lower east side in an area where people are eating a lot of Spanish food, but on some days she has more Chinese people than Spanish coming in, and this was one of those days. I’ve always loved Spanish food, and platanos are a staple in that diet. They’re something I love to have but I don’t buy them often because they’re not part of my own background so they’re not something I think about making all the time. But if someone gives me some, I’ll gladly take them, and she gave me one yellow sweet one and one green one – the yellow for frying and the green one for boiling and mashing. The only reason I know that is because I’m one of those people who loves food from all over and I love to learn how to make it myself. So when I’ve had plantains in the past I’ve asked people how to make them, and though I don’t know it like I know my own family recipes, I know how to do it if I have them to cook.

When I asked the Lord what to write about for today, He said, “Platanos.” I know that may sound like a weird thing for the Lord to tell me to write about, but He knows me, and He knows exactly what I’ll do. I’ll go online and look it up and I’ll find out that they’re in the same family as the sycamore or mulberry tree, a tree that is all over the Bible. It is the tree that Levi the tax collector who is renamed Matthew – the disciple who is the writer of the first Gospel – climbs up into to see Jesus as He is passing by. He is a small man, and he wants to see Jesus and he climbs into the tree to do it. Jesus calls to him and invites Himself over for dinner. Matthew, then named Levi, climbs down and the rest as they say is history.

The reason this is so significant to me, and why the Lord wanted me to have this experience of discovery, is because of all of the disciples, Matthew was the only one who was grouped in with the sinners. All of the other disciples were working men, fishermen mostly, and maybe they were not the most pious of men, but they weren’t grouped with the sinners. Except for Judas of course, but he only ended up in a very bad end because of a very bad decision he made. But Matthew started out being known as a tax collector, which was something that no one respected. They were known for taking bribes and making money off of people, overcharging and skimming off the top. And Matthew was named Levi which echoes back to the Priestly line, so the fact that he was in the profession he was meant that not only was he sinning before God by putting money before Him, but that he was denying his own heritage and taking advantage of his own people. When Jesus goes to his house to eat, the Bible tells us, “many tax collectors and sinners came to eat with Him and His disciples.” (Matthew 9:10). “When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw Him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked His disciples, ‘Why does He eat with tax collectors and sinners?’” (Mark 2:16)

Why does Jesus decide to break bread with tax collectors and sinners? I really don’t have an answer to that except for what He says Himself, “For the Son of man has come to save that which was lost,” (Matthew 18:11),” and “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” (Matthew 9:12) What He says is truth, but it doesn’t really explain why He bothers, but whatever His reasons, I’m sure glad He does.

I hadn’t slept well on Wednesday night, and I keep falling back into the same feelings of doubt. I keep worrying that I haven’t really been hearing God at all – that maybe I just need to think I do or else I’ll have to give up on life itself. And that is really at the heart of what Jesus came for – to give hope to the hopeless, to give life to the lifeless, to give strength to the weary and joy and healing to the wounded and downcast. The strangest thing to me when I get to feeling that maybe these are just things I wish were true instead of truth itself is that I know what God has done in my life, and I have seen His miracles every day. I am different now, my life is blessed. Even when things rise up against me He covers me and brings me through it all. There may be struggles and trials, difficult times and challenging ones, but the outcome is always the same – I’m better off when I get to the other side than I was when I started on His road.

Before I was born again I never knew a thing about how to make platanos. I’d seen them in the stores and eaten them in one restaurant that was in a building I lived in for a time, but I never thought of buying them or cooking them. Then come one day and I am made a new creation in Christ, and He sends me to the lower east side of Manhattan where I start to learn how to cook things I never had tried to cook before. He took me from my place of comfort and led me to a new and unfamiliar one, but He made comfort for me there and completely turned my life around. When I get to feeling doubts and worries, when I get to the place of wondering if I can believe, all I have to do is look back on where I came from, and know that but for His grace I wouldn’t be alive today.

And I’m much more than just alive, much more than just going through the motions in the way I used to do. In spite of the doubts that come to rob me of sleep, in spite of the tears of a heart that is afraid to hope, in spite of those things that come against me and threaten my peace and my joy, I have peace and joy and hope and faith as a gift from God.

In John 16:33 Jesus says to His disciples, “I have told you these things so that in me you have peace. In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” When Levi climbed the sycamore tree, he didn’t know what he would see. But Matthew understood that what he saw brought life, joy, peace and love, and that makes all the difference.

Blessings,

Jannie Susan