Ps. 68.24-25 (the first act, not the fifth)

Your processions / are in view / O God
the procession / of my God
my King / among the holy ones!
Singers are in front / minstrels behind,
in the midst / of girls / beating tambourines! 

We will include the following verses below but we must pause here. The opening of the psalm was the call for God to “arise”, to conquer his enemies. We saw that this conquering was most powerfully on display when he ‘took Zion’ with his ten-thousand upon ten-thousand holy ones. When he moved in their midst as the flaming Mount Sinai. In the opening, the enemy-haters are likened to smoke which God “blows away”. In this way they are an obstruction, a veiling and a covering over the land. They conceal through the residue of flame. This concealment is, clearly, a wicked darkness. Further, as we saw in the ‘taking in Zion’, beauty is allowed to emerge for the first time. There, the public display of God’s victory is evident; it is on display; it is, importantly, public and shining. What we see is that the ‘taking of Zion’, and the emergence of beauty, represents the dispelling of the ‘smoke of the wicked’. What was hampered in private, calling for deliverance, is now turned into public processions (into liturgy). The hiatus between God’s seeing and God’s acting (his enthronement on Zion) is closed and, crucially, it is one that is accomplished through the conquering of death and the establishment of ‘forever’. All of these threads come together: “blowing away of smoke”; “taking of Zion”; establishment of his dwelling forever; extravagant beauty; and publicity. Here, beauty can be trusted because Death has been conquered, Zion established and God has become King. Beauty can emerge from hiding because the smoke of enemy-haters has been dispersed. And beauty wants to be public (it wants to be liturgical) and expressive. And this cannot be achieved without the unifying force of God’s Zion-power. Once that is enacted the vulnerability of its expression (its expressive power) can actively assert itself. It is as if, at that point, the play can actually begin. It is not the fifth act; it is the first. (So, we didn’t get to the other verses…).