For even though they found no grounds for a death sentence,
they asked Pilate to have him put to death,
and when they had accomplished all that was written about him,
they took him down from the tree and placed him in a tomb.
But God raised him from the dead,
and for many days he appeared to those
who had come up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem.
Along with the many ingenious ways in which the Evangelist Saint Luke portrayed the Acts of Jesus and the Acts of the Apostles, he highlighted the striking similarity in the ways Jesus and Saint Paul were prosecuted.
In today's first reading, we hear Saint Paul insisting that the Lord's accusers, the Jewish puppets of the Roman occupiers, "found no grounds for a death sentence, (but) asked Pilate to have him put to death" anyway. When Saint Paul's endless travelling from town to town was finally stopped by his arrest, they were helpless against his outspoken self-defense. No accusation would stick.
And then, because he really wanted to go to Rome and the Lord had personally, in a vision, told him he would go to Rome, when he appealed to Caesar the imperial officials had no choice but to send him there -- at government expense! Despite the fuming of his enemies who would have preferred to kill him and get it over with.
But killing Jesus had not suppressed his Good News of the Kingdom of God; in fact it only propelled the Lord into Hell where he freed the just from bondage (1 Peter 3:18-20), relieved heaven of Satan's power (Rev 12:7-9), and germinated the seed that would spread like kudzu to every nation on earth (Psalm 72:11).
Likewise, the arrest of Saint Paul only provided an ironically appropriate way for the Gospel to arrive in Rome. Just as Jesus had died on a cross, Paul arrived in Rome as a prisoner. (But, Saint Luke says, he was recognized as a man of substance by Roman officials and by Jewish leaders.)
When children sing, "He's got the whole world in his hands!" they sing of how the Lord uses the short-sighted foolishness of religious and government officials to promote His work of saving the world and all its peoples. We hope and believe He is now using cocksure Christian nationalists and the polarized federal government for the same magnificent purposes. We have only to watch and pray for that to be revealed.