Savannah Guthrie shared a message in her New York church during Sunday morning Easter services broadcast by Good Shepherd New York, an ecumenical congregation focused on Christian unity.
On the day before her April 6 return to the “Today” show, 46 days after her mother was abducted in Arizona, Guthrie was invited to share “a window into her struggle and wrestle for Easter hope in the midst of a Good Friday reality” by Pastor Michael Rudzena, who introduced her as “our beloved parishioner, Savannah.”
When hope and happiness seem far away
After wishing everyone a happy Easter, Guthrie acknowledged the hopeful positivity most often associated with the day: “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.”
This is also “the most important day of the year for all of us who believe,” Guthrie said, “even more than Christ’s birth, more than his death” — a day celebrating “his resurrection, his second birth into a permanent life.”
“That (event) is what is most crucial to us,” she said. “We celebrate today the promise of a new life that never ends in death.”
“But standing here today,” Guthrie continued, “I have to tell you, there are moments in which that promise seems irretrievably far away — when life itself seems far harder than death.”
Jesus understands … doesn’t he?
Referring to “these moments of deep disappointment with God” when it’s easy to feel “utter abandonment,” the “Today” host said, “For most of us, there will come a time in our life when these feelings hold sway.”
But believers aren’t alone in these heavy feelings, Guthrie said. “In our tradition, we are taught to take comfort in the fact that our friend, Jesus, in his short life experienced every single emotion that we humans can feel — that his taking on the form of humanity made him not a distant observer to our pain but a hands-on experiencer of it.”
In the wake of her family’s experience, however, Guthrie admitted she started to question “whether Jesus really ever experienced this particular wound that (she feels) … this excruciating ‘not knowing.’”
Maybe Jesus “did not know,” she admitted wondering in her darker moments. After all, Guthrie said, wasn’t Jesus aware of how events would eventually unfold?
Revelation arising from honest questions
It isn’t wrong to challenge God with questions, she said. “God does not ask us to be stoics with … Zen-like remove or shallow sloganeering about the hard battle God gives to his toughest soldiers.”
“Our questions to God — our wrestling with God — is his opportunity,” she continued. “For through our authenticity and vulnerability comes a portal of revelation: the imparting of truth and wisdom.”
That’s what happened to her, Guthrie said. “As I stared at yet another incongruently luminous desert sunset amidst my spirit’s utter darkness, suddenly, I remembered the grave” — referring to Christ’s three days in the tomb.
“No one talks much about that,” she said. “We cut to the happy ending and the joy of Sunday morning” after focusing on Friday’s “agony of crucifixion.”
Yet “what did he actually know” after breathing his last breath? Guthrie noted that Jesus cried in his final moments, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
“That is the anguished cry of someone who does not know the answers,” she said.
What was Jesus feeling after dying?
“Where did his soul and his spirit go in those days in between? And what was he thinking?”
Guthrie herself wondered whether those three days may have involved uncertainty or continued pain: “Does his agony seem indefinite to him? … Perhaps he did know this feeling after all.”
This question has particular interest for Latter-day Saints. Near the end of World War I and soon after the death of his son, President Joseph F. Smith, then-president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, reflected on Peter’s New Testament teachings about Christ being “quickened by the Spirit” after his death, “by which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison.”
Coming out of his own uncertainty about questions he pondered, President Smith shared sacred impressions about how Christ in that time “between the crucifixion and his resurrection” had visited the spirits of the dead “declaring liberty to the captives who had been faithful.”
A ‘sweet presence’ amid uncertainty
“As humans living on this earth now, we are all suspended in that moment of uncertainty,” Guthrie went on to say — “not three days, but thousands of years between his cross and our resurrection with him.”
A person’s faith gives them a spiritual conviction that they will be reborn, that God will redeem this pain, that every tear will be wiped away, that Easter is coming, she said.
“But we live viscerally in the meantime. The meantime of feeling unsure, lost, abandoned, disappointed, enraged, forgotten.”
The comfort is that God has felt those feelings from a perspective of humanity, she said.
“He promises closeness to the brokenhearted — somehow, miraculously — his loving and gentle presence that makes the meantime less mean.”
Darkness and light
Perhaps this is too dark a message to share on Easter morning, Guthrie concluded.
“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.
“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.
“So, I close my eyes this morning, and I feel the sunshine. 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. I still believe.
“And so I say with conviction, happy Easter.”