Savannah Guthrie shared an Easter message reflecting on her faith journey as the search continues for her missing mother, Nancy Guthrie.
The Today show co-anchor — who is set to return to NBC’s broadcast on Monday — described how she has felt “moments of deep disappointment with God” in a video message shared by her church Good Shepherd New York.
“We celebrate today the promise of a new life that never ends in death,” Guthrie said in a video published Sunday. “But standing here today, I have to tell you, there are moments in which that promise seems irretrievably far away. When life itself seems far harder than death.”
She described them as moments marked by a “deep disappointment with God, the feeling of utter abandonment,” she continued.
Guthrie said she was taught Jesus had “experienced every single emotion that we humans can feel,” but recently questioned whether he “really ever experienced this particular wound that I feel.”
“This grievous and uniquely cruel injury of not knowing, of uncertainty and confusion and answers withheld. In those darkest moments I have thought bitterly, and perhaps irreverently, that I have stumbled upon a feeling that Jesus did not know,” she said.
Guthrie then explained how she turned to the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection.
“I remembered three days in the grave. No one talks much about that. We focus mostly on Easter, of course we do. We cut to the happy ending and the joy of Sunday morning. And yes, we do observe the Friday before, the agony of crucifixion, we mourn by candlelight that darkest night,” she said.
“But after Jesus died, after he breathed his last, what did he actually know? On the cross, he cried out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ That is the anguished cry of someone who does not know the answers,” she added.
Guthrie concluded the message by reflecting on what it means to celebrate Easter.
“Perhaps this is too dark a message to share on Easter morning, but I have long believed that we miss out on fully celebrating resurrection if we do not acknowledge the feelings of loss, pain and, yes, death,” she said. “It is the darkness that makes this morning's light so magnificent, so blindingly beautiful. It is all the brighter because it is so desperately needed.”
Nancy Guthrie was last seen at her home near Tucson, Arizona, on January 31 and was reported missing the next day. Security footage released by police in February shows a masked and armed individual at her front door the morning she vanished.
The Guthrie family is offering a $1 million reward for information that leads to their mother’s recovery.
Guthrie opened up about the search for her mother in an interview with Hoda Kotb last month.
“I don’t know that it’s because she’s my mom and somebody thought, ‘Oh, that lady has money and we can make a quick buck.’ I mean, that would make sense,” she said. “But we don’t know ... which is too much to bear, to think that I brought this to her bedside.”
She is expected to return to the Today show on Monday after stepping away in the wake of her mother’s disappearance.
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