Consider:
I. This unscrupulous priest and his savage advice. Remember who he was: the high priest of the nation, with Aaron's mitre on his brow and centuries of illustrious traditions embodied in his person; in whose heart justice and mercy should have found a sanctuary, if they had fled from all others; whose ears ought to have been opened to the faintest whisper of the voice of God; whose lips should ever have been ready to witness for the truth. And see what he is: a crafty schemer, as blind as a mole to the beauty of Christ's character and the greatness of His words; utterly unspiritual; undisguisedly selfish, rude as a boor, cruel as a cut-throat; nay, he has reached that supreme height of wickedness in which he can dress his ugliest thought in the plainest words and send them into the world unabashed. This selfish consideration of our own interests will, (1) make us as blind as bats to the most radiant beauty of truth; (2) bring us down to any kind and degree of wrong-doing; (3) must sear our conscience so that we may come to view the evil and never to know that there is anything wrong in it.
II. The unconscious prophet and his great prediction. The evangelist conceives that the man who filled the office of high priest, being the head of the theocratic community, was naturally the medium of a Divine oracle. Caiaphas was in reality the last of the high priests, and those that succeeded him for something less than half a century were but like ghosts that walked after cock-crow. "Being high priest, he prophesied." The lips of this unworthy, selfish, unspiritual, unscrupulous, cruel priest were so used as that, all unconsciously, his words lent themselves to the proclamation of the glorious central truth of Christianity, that Christ died for the nation that slew Him and rejected Him, nor for them alone, but for all the world.
A. Maclaren, Christ in the Heart,p. 257.
References: John 11:49; John 11:50. F. D. Maurice, The Gospel of St. John,p. 321; Homilist,vol. vi., p. 40. John 11:49-52. Homiletic Magazine,vol. xiii., p. 299. John 11:52. J. Vaughan, Sermons,12th series, p. 109.