Steven Sim

Kit Siang called Teresa Kok a saint.

St. Teresa of Seputeh

I think she’s somewhat of a prophet as well…

Excerpt from an interview of YB Teresa Kok by Guang Ming Daily the same week after her release from unjust detention under the Internal Security Act (ISA)

Q: Will this arrest affect the way you do things in the future?

A: Not much. Even if we go to jail, we have to make sure it is not in vain. We can’t go to jail just because we have said something we shouldn’t have said.

To be frank, I felt downcrested on the first two days, but after seeing my parents, who told me many people out there were giving me their support, I began to change my attitude.

If my detention can raise the people’s awareness on ISA, as well as their fury towards the BN government, then I feel it’s not in vain, and I won’t feel so frustrated any more.

I was also thinking of the judgement Jesus had to go through. Even though He was crucified on the cross, He has been remembered by people through the ages. I felt that my detention had been arranged in such a way that Jesus was trying to use my innocence to educate the public on politics. (Emphasis mine)

Teresa sees the experience during her unjust detention and political oppression as a form of revelation, a prophetic and objective lesson to Malaysians (and should it be particularly the Malaysian Church) on the political climate of our Country.

Often, we tend to see prophets as someone fore-telling future events. But perhaps more than anything, in the Old Testament, prophets were people who declare the message of god, whether a message about the future or for the present time. And most of the time, these messages, the prophecies, they were indictment against the evil times the prophets lived in. It is also not unusual that prophets not only speak forth their messages, but also acted them out, sometimes in dramatic actions.

Among my favourite examples are…

- Isaiah 58, the prophet was responding to the lamentation of Israel about god’s presumed silence at a crucial moment of the nation being attacked by their enemies. God spoke through Isaiah the prophet, castigating Israel and telling them why their rigourous worship was greeted with divine silence and thus giving a social commentary of Isaiah’s times. (interestingly the first indictment about the unacceptability of Israel’s worship is: v3 “You exploit all your workers”)

- Hosea 1, god instructing Hosea the prophet to take a promiscious prostitute as his own wife and live out Israel’s relationship with her Master and Husband, YHWH. Hmmm…a “pastor” sleeping with a prostitute…

- Jeremiah 27, Jeremiah was told to warn Israel and her allies to submit to Babylon and King Nebuchadnezzar, and he presented the warning wearing a wooden yoke around his neck. Interestingly, god called Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, “my servant Nebuchadnezzar “.

And of course, Jesus who loved to do his little show and tell as he taught his disciples – he cursed the fig tree, he ate with the outcast, he whipped the temple traders and chased them out, he did some stuff with simple bread and fish and wine, he took off his jacket and washed the disciples’ feet.

It would not be a surprise therefore if god chose to speak through one of his modern day servants, as imperfect as they may be (After all, the guys in the old days were not the “saintliest” of people either). I pray especially for the Malaysian Church to discern these prophetic words in such a times as ours.