Of all the human creatures who have been inundated with the divine joys of Our Lord’s Resurrection, it is certain that none was more favoured than His own Mother, and none tasted them more unselfishly and more purely.

The fact that the Gospels have left it to Tradition to relate the reunion between the Risen Christ and Our Lady, shows us the perfection of her selflessness and purity even in the extraordinary joy of the Resurrection.

As she forgot herself in her compassion, she forgets herself in her consolation. She is delighted not with her own deliverance, but with that of her Son. Her happiness can only be represented in the form of an ecstasy which made her, as it were, live outside herself in the triumphant Christ.

Certainly, like the apostles and the holy women, and even before them, she saw her risen Son in a dazzling spectacle that prefigured that of the beatific vision.

At the same time, Jesus appeared to her as the source of all truth, all life, all good.

From His glorious wounds, from His Heart overflowing with love, there already flowed the rivers of living water, announced by the Prophets, which would wash away all sins and make all the seeds of divine Revelation flourish. Mary Mediatrix was the first to receive them in her soul, and from then on, their outpourings would be unchangeable: they would pass only through Mary.

Jesus showed her how she had been Coredemptrix by her motherhood and by her communion of will and suffering, and how she would be, because of this singular union with him, Dispenser of all graces.

The apostles were witnesses of the Resurrection as a certain visible fact. But the interior of this mystery was revealed in a very profound way only to Mary, as was also the case with the mystery of the sufferings.

It is she who will make us grasp the relationship that God has established between the Cross and the Resurrection. For the Cross is not a defeat and the Resurrection a victorious revenge. No, the Cross is already the victory; the Resurrection is the first visible effect of the victory of the Cross in the humanity of Christ. Mary passed through the Cross, she also triumphed through the Cross.

The Resurrection is the beatitude of those who have been poor, persecuted, showered with humiliation and tears. We must therefore not be under any illusion about the real joys of the Resurrection.

Indeed, we are tempted to think only of our resurrection as a wonderful fact that will follow our death. But Saint Paul insists that we are already risen in Christ and we must live as risen people.

Our Lady shows us how participating in the Resurrection of her son, she becomes the Mediatrix of all graces: in a similar way we, “risen in Christ”, must be apostles and communicate to others the life of the glorified Jesus, through Mary.

We must therefore ask Our Lady for the grace of a selfless joy like hers, and also for the grace to bear witness that Jesus is truly risen, and so become instruments of the “true light that shines in the world”, “Christ, yesterday, today and forever”.