John 11:51-52

“ Now he did not say this of himself; but being high-priest of that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation, 52 and not for the nation only, but also that he might gather in one body the children of God who are scattered abroad. ”

This opinion of the high-priest was made especially remarkable by the contrast between the divine truth which it expressed and the diabolical design which inspired it. The evangelist calls attention to this. Some interpreters (Luthardt, Bruckner) deny that John ascribes the gift of prophecy here to the high-priest as such. It was not as high-priest, but as high-priest of that year, that Caiaphas uttered this prophetic declaration. But the relation between the present participle ὤν, being, and the aorist, προεφήτευσεν, he prophesied, leads us naturally to the idea that the evangelist attaches to the office of Caiaphas the prophetic character of the words which he uttered at this moment. This must be acknowledged even if we are to find here only a Jewish superstition. In the Old Testament, the normal centre of the theocratic people is, not the royal office, but the priesthood. In all the decisive moments for the life of the people, it is the high- priest who is the organ of God for passing over to the people the decision with which its salvation is connected (Exodus 28:30; Numbers 27:21; 1 Samuel 30:7 ff.). It is true that this prerogative came not from a prophetic gift, but from the possession of a mysterious power, the Urim and Thummim. It is also true that from the time of the captivity, and even from the reign of Solomon, there is no longer any question of this power (see Keil, Bibl. Archaeol., p. 191). But the high-priest nevertheless remained by reason of his very office the head of the theocratic body, and this in spite of the moral contrast which might exist between the spirit of his office and his personal character.

If the heart of the high-priest was in harmony with his office, his heart became the normal organ of the divine decision. But if there was opposition in this personage between the disposition of his heart and the holiness of his office, it must be expected that, as in the present case, the divine oracle would be seen coming from this consecrated mouth in the form of the most diabolical maxim. What, indeed, more worthy of the Divine Spirit than to condemn His degenerate organ thus to utter the truth of God at the very moment when he was speaking as the organ of his own particular interest! Without attributing to Caiaphas a permanent prophetic gift, John means to say that, at this supreme moment for the theocracy and for humanity, it was not without the participation of the Divine activity that the most profound mystery of the plan of God was proclaimed by him in the form of the most detestable maxim. John has already more than once remarked how the adversaries of Jesus, when speaking derisively, were prophesying in spite of themselves: “ No one knows whence he is ” (John 7:27). “ Will he go and teach the Greeks ” (John 7:35)? If the devil often travesties the words of God, it pleases God sometimes to parody those of the devil, by giving to them an unexpected truth. This “divine irony” manifested itself in the highest degree on this occasion, which was the prelude to the accomplishment of the most divine mystery under the form of the most monstrous act.

According to some interpreters, the ὅτι is not a direct complement of the verb he prophesied. Meyer: “he prophesied as to the fact that...” Luthardt, Weiss, Keil: “he prophesied, seeing that really Jesus was to...” John 11:52 is what has led them to these explanations, because this verse goes in fact beyond the import of the saying of Caiaphas. But it is quite unnatural to take this word: he prophesied, in an absolute sense: John certainly did not mean to insist so especially on this idea of prophecy. The meaning is simply: “he declared prophetically that to...” As to John 11:52, it is an explanatory appendix, which John adds in order to indicate that in the divine thought the force of the expression: one for all, had a far wider application than that which Caiaphas himself gave it. John never forgets his Greek readers, and he loses no occasion of recalling to them their part in the accomplishment of the divine promises. If we take into consideration the parallelism between this John 11:52 and the saying of John 10:16, we shall have no hesitation in applying the term children of God to heathen predisposed to faith through the revelation of the Logos (John 1:4; John 1:10); the sense is the same as that in which John uses the expressions: to be of God (John 8:47), to be of the truth (John 19:37). The term children of God naturally involves an anticipation; it designates the actual condition of these future believers from the point of view of its result which was to come. Meyer, Luthardt and others prefer to explain this term from the standpoint of the divine predestination. But we should be obliged to infer from this that all the rest of the heathen are the objects of an opposite predestination.