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My Son...

A few weeks ago I went to see the new movie “Thor” based on Marvel Comics’ take on the old Norse myths… I went with my ten year old son, who is, like me at his age a complete nut about Marvel Superheroes and ancient myths and we were both keen to see this latest big screen interpretation… Here's the trailer for those of you who missed it...




Just incase you couldn't make head nor tail of this, and here I flag up a slight spoiler alert, the key element of the plot is that Thor, son of the King of the Norse god’s Odin, is banished from Asgard to earth as a form of punishment by his father and has to prove himself worthy in order to restore himself to his father’s favour… You can guess for yourself how it all works out…
I won't give a detailed critique of the film, as I'll post my thoughts on that front elsewhere, although, to be truthful, while I enjoyed it, it probably doesn't really stand up under close scrutiny.
However, I did find myself thinking that the story portrayed contrasts strongly with the story of the son of God that we read in the Bible… there, Jesus isn’t banished from heaven, he freely chooses to give up the riches to heaven out of love for the world, and he doesn’t need to earn his heavenly father’s favour… indeed right at the outset of his mission on earth, when he was being baptised by John, a voice echoes from heaven, saying “This is my son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased…”
And the thing is that our heavenly Father wants all his children to hear him say that of us… and to us, and through Jesus we can… We can’t earn God’s favour… nothing we can say or do can possibly do that… and like any father or mother there is nothing that we his children could make him love us an more...
His love and his pleasure are his gifts to us if only we will accept...

An adaptation of this morning's "Just a Moment" on Downtown and my talk from last Sunday morning...
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