Hellot guys I’m currently working on my authorizer lambda. But I can not wrap my head why it returns 500 error with empty msg: “” from my midleware, when I return response code and status message.

I have the following setup,

I have the middlewares

import middy from '@middy/core';
import httpHeadeNormalizer from '@middy/http-header-normalizer''

const authMiddleware = (hander) => {
 return middy(handler).use(httpHeaderNormalizer())use(loadCreds())
}


const loadCreds = () => {
  return {
    before: async () => {
         try {

                  
    const token = event.headers.authorization.replace(/[Bb]earer/, '');

    try { 
     const decoded = jwt.verify(token, 'secret');
   } catch (err) {
            return {
               statusCode: 401,
                body: 'Unauthorized',
            }
         }
    }

}
}

and my authorizer lambda

export const authHandler = authMiddleware(
async (event) => {
    const requestContext: { accountId, stage, apiId}, methodArn = event;
    const region = 'us-east-1';  
    const policy = new AuthPolicy(accountId, { apiId, region, stage});

    const token = event.headers.authorization.replace(/[Bb]earer/, '');

    try { 
     const decoded = jwt.verify(token, 'secret');
    
    } catch(err) {
      policy.denyAllMethods('Token expired');
      return policy.build()
    }

})

The problem is happening in my loadCreds middleware, the token expires
and I return the following

 {
     statusCode: 401,
     body: 'Unauthorized',
}

But it is not working, the lambda always return 500 status code with empty body. If I use policy then its working fine, but it is returning code 403 instead of 401. And I wold like to send a custom code and custom response message. Is that possible?