Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie shared a candid Easter 2026 message, questioning the depth of the Christian Jesus’ suffering amid her mother, Nancy Guthrie’s, ongoing disappearance.
“Good morning, everybody. Happy Easter,” Guthrie said while attending Good Shepherd New York’s digital Easter service on Sunday, April 5, per Variety. “And Easter is happy. It is flowers and pastels and baby bunnies. It is sunshine and joy and hope. It is rebirth and second chances and new life and fresh starts. It is the most important day of the year for all of us who believe, even more than Christ’s birth, more than his death. His resurrection, his second birth into a permanent life, that is what is most crucial to us. His revival and resurrection means the same for us. We celebrate today the promise of a new life that never ends in death.”
She continued, “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. These moments of deep disappointment with God, the feeling of utter abandonment for most of us, there will come a time in our life when these feelings hold sway.”
After the Guthrie family’s matriarch went missing on January 31, Guthrie told the congregation that she has experienced her own “season of trial,” much like the Christian Jesus Christ.
“Jesus, in his short life, experienced every single emotion that we humans can feel,” she continued, before she openly “questioned whether Jesus 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.”
Nancy and Savannah Guthrie Courtesy of NBC News
“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,” Guthrie added. “Where did his soul and his spirit go in those days in between? And what was he thinking? Did he think his time in the grave would be a day or two, or 1000 years in the grave? Does his agony seem indefinite to him? That torment of uncertainty, the way indefinite pain can feel eternal. Perhaps he did know this feeling after all.”
Guthrie, who is scheduled to return to the Today show on Monday, April 6, then openly questioned if her pondering was “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 added. “It is the darkness that makes this morning’s light so magnificent, so blindly beautiful. It is all the brighter because it is so desperately needed.”
Shortly after Savannah’s mother was reported missing, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos announced that authorities believe the 84-year-old was kidnapped from her home. Despite multiple so-called ransom letters, home security footage featuring a possible intruder and potential clues left at the scene of Nancy’s Arizona home, no suspects have been identified in the ongoing case.
Savannah and her siblings — Camron Guthrie, 61, and Annie Guthrie, 56 — have been outspoken since their mother’s apparent kidnapping, pleading for her return via multiple social media posts. Their most recent statement came on March 21.
“We are deeply grateful for the outpouring from neighbors, friends and the people of Tucson. We are all family now,” the family shared in a news special, which aired via Tucson’s local KVOA-TV News channel. “We continue to believe it’s Tucsonians, and the greater Southern Arizona community, that hold the key to finding resolution in this case. Someone knows something.”
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