In the passage immediately preceding that of today’s first reading from the book of Acts, the apostles are working great miracles among the people where even Peter’s shadow falling on the sick was enough to heal them.  This was causing huge alarm among the Jewish leadership who were trying, as we shall see in the readings until Friday, to thwart this new movement who functioned in the name of Jesus, whom they regarded as heretical. What’s more, these apostles kept claiming that he was risen from the dead, and the only way they were able to perform any of those miracles, was through the name of Jesus who was indeed alive, and who had conquered death.