“Today” show host Savannah Guthrie used an Easter message to reflect on faith, doubt and uncertainty as her mother, Nancy Guthrie, remains missing after 63 days.
The message was shared by Good Shepherd New York during its digital Easter gathering on YouTube, where Guthrie delivered a deeply reflective message about navigating grief and unanswered questions during what she described as a difficult season.
Nancy Guthrie, 84, was last seen after she was believed to have been taken from her bedroom in northern Tucson, Arizona, around 2 a.m. on Feb. 1. Responding officers found a thin trail of blood droplets leading from the front door to the edge of the driveway. Her back doors were propped open, and a doorbell camera was missing.
Investigators later recovered home security footage showing a masked man on the doorstep, who has not been identified. The trail of evidence appeared to end at the driveway, and her whereabouts remain unknown.
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Guthrie acknowledged that Easter’s promise of hope and new life can feel distant as she faces the uncertainty surrounding her mother’s disappearance.
“There are moments in which that promise seems irretrievably far away, when life itself seems far harder than death,” Guthrie said. “These moments of deep disappointment with God, the feeling of utter abandonment.”
Guthrie said that in her recent “season of trial,” she questioned whether Jesus experienced the same kind of uncertainty she now feels, particularly the pain of not knowing what comes next or why suffering is unfolding.
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“I have wondered – I have 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,” she said. “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 her perspective began to shift as she reflected on the period between the crucifixion and resurrection, a span she described as often overlooked but central to understanding faith in moments of uncertainty.
“After Jesus died, after he breathed his last, what did he actually know?” Guthrie said. “Did he think his time in the grave would be a day or two or a thousand 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 said that realization helped her reframe her own experience, describing life as existing in a kind of “meantime” — a period marked by waiting, unanswered questions and the absence of clear resolution.
She said that in those moments, people can feel unsure, lost, abandoned, disappointed and forgotten, even as faith calls them to trust in a future they cannot yet see.
Despite that struggle, Guthrie said her faith remains rooted in the belief that God is present even without immediate answers, offering comfort not through certainty, but through presence.
“It is the darkness that makes this morning’s light so magnificent, so blindingly beautiful,” Guthrie said. “It is all the brighter because it is so desperately needed.”
“So I close my eyes this morning and I feel the sunshine,” she continued. “I see a bright vision of the day when heaven and earth pass away because they are one on earth as it is in heaven.”
“When we celebrate today, this is what we celebrate, and I celebrate, too,” she said. “I still believe. And so I say with conviction, happy Easter.”
