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An Altar Boy and the Mystery of Faith

April 1, 2026

Isaiah 50:4-9a | Hebrews 12:1-3 | John 13:21-32 | Psalm 70

As an 8-year-old altar boy at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea Church in Narragansett, I found our pastor, Father Hughes, mesmerizing. His voice was so sonorous that, to me, he sounded like God Himself. When he bent over the chalice during the Eucharist and intoned, “the mystery of faith,” I was transfixed.

Those words—and Father Hughes’s voice—came back to me after reading today’s lessons.

The collect greets us with a jarring call to action: “Lord God, whose blessed Son our Savior gave his body to be whipped and his face to be spit upon: Give us grace to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time.”

Accept sufferings joyfully?

Isaiah echoes this difficult request: “I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.” The epistle notes that Jesus endured the cross “for the sake of the joy that was set before him.”

Another juxtaposition of suffering and joy.

The gospel reading is more straightforward. It tells the familiar story of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus. Even as an 8-year-old, I understood the gravity of Judas’s actions.

But words Jesus speaks later in the passage confounded me again: “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.”

Judas’s betrayal hastens Jesus’s death. How is this glorification?

I learned that in John’s gospel, “glorified” means God’s love and saving purpose are being made visible in Jesus. John presents the cross, resurrection, and exaltation as one great movement of glory. What looks like defeat is, in fact, the moment when Jesus’s unity with the Father is made clear, and his true identity and mission are revealed. Once the betrayal is in motion, the moment has arrived when people will see who Jesus truly is.

It is fitting that today’s reading from John made me think of Father Hughes’s words, spoken almost 60 years ago at the altar of St. Mary’s. Here is the full text: “For this is the chalice of my blood of the new and eternal covenant: the mystery of faith, which shall be shed for you and for many unto the forgiveness of sins.”

In our liturgy at St. Luke’s, this acclimation is voiced after the consecration of the wine: “Therefore, we proclaim the mystery of faith: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.”

How Christ will come again is a mystery.

But every time we celebrate the Eucharist, he is present with us.

John Walsh