Luke 9:53 Meaning and Explanation

The village refuses him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem. Samaritans worshiped on Mount Gerizim and resented pilgrims bound for the rival temple; hospitality collided with an old religious quarrel, and the quarrel won. The Lord of glory is turned away over a grudge about where God should be worshiped.

He had been refused before, in Nazareth, and will be refused finally at Jerusalem itself; rejection lines the whole road of his obedience. Yet he receives the insult without retaliation, as the next verses show. People still close the door on Christ for reasons that have little to do with him, inherited resentments, old wounds, settled prejudice. He bears the refusal, and keeps walking toward the cross that heals precisely such divisions.