For Those Afraid to Die
“For me to live is Christ, to die is gain.”
Philippians 1.21
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is one of the great preaching texts of the twentieth century. It has been revived five or six times on Broadway, been produced for mass audiences in the UK, China, India. The final eulogy is worth reading:
"A salesman doesn’t build anything, he don’t put a bolt to a nut or a seed in the ground. A man who doesn’t build anything must be liked. He must be cheerful on bad days. Even calamities mustn’t break through. Cause one thing, he has got to be liked. He don't tell you the law or give you medicine. So there’s no rock bottom to your life. All you know is that on good days or bad, you gotta come in cheerful. No calamity must be permitted to break through, Cause one thing, always, you’re a man who’s gotta be believed. You’re way out there riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smilin’ back, the sky falls in. And then you get a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Cause there’s no rock bottom to your life."
It's a play about being stalked by death, both metaphorical and literal. Audiences don't connect with the story because they know someone who feels that death is on their heels, it's because they feel death on their heels.
We all work in sales to some degree. You sell you to the world. You sell your good looks and competence to prospective mates. You sell your usefulness to your employer and when they're done with you, you sell your usefulness to the next company. Life is a sales pitch and we hope to god that people are buying. Charley's eulogy is so powerful because it happens graveside, where the playwright wants us to see, up against the great teacher death itself, that there's only so far a good pitch can take you.
Biff Loman, in one of the final scenes forces his father to face facts. Biff is finished believing that he's exceptional, he is no longer buying the idea that he can make it big, and tells his father "I'm a dime-a-dozen, pop! And so are you."
Eventually the time to make it big in this world runs out. And every person must know it: the theatre-goer with a rolled up program pressed against their lips, to the usher with a metastasizing tumor growing on their pancreas, to the grandchild running his Hotwheels along the armrest in the balcony, to his grandfather next to him, whose father died young, and his father before him. To the preacher who is dealing his outline out on the pulpit, praying to God he has something to say. Is it true that all are being stalked by death even as they live? Is there anything a pulpit can say to that?
To live is Christ, says St. Paul. To live is to be in Christ. To be hidden in Christ (Col. 3.3), to be crucified with Christ (Gal 2.20), so that, paradoxically, we can live. The Bible wants us to know that there is a world to come, and that world to come leverages every present moment with great potential life. And so every choice we make in service to that life bears fruit, and every indignity we endure has its limit.
One wonders what Arthur Miller would have thought of the idea: that what you are looking at, graveside, is not the final moment of truth. The moment of truth, in Christian theology, happens sooner. In fact, the moment of truth happens whenever a person finds their life in Christ by faith. The moment in which a person has received from Jesus their wholeness and healing, their truest humanity—they've made it big. And the salesman can sell, and the stay-at-home parent can parent, and the single man or woman can live a life of great fruitfulness without ever marrying, and without wondering whether or not it was worth it, and without desperately trying to outrun their own death. We are slow to learn this order of living, so every week the Church is called to rehearse it again, death alchemized to life in wine and bread. Eat and drink and though you die, still you live. It’s the plot point every playwright would kill to add in the fourth act, but who would believe it? "To live is Christ" means that, in one sense, the living have already had their dying.
Philippians 1.20-21 turns the tables. To die is to be with the Lord. But even more, to live is to be in the Lord, to suffer in his way, to bear his life, to push back the frontiers of darkness, to fill the world with the music of redemption. That new life is not something we reach by chasing it; rather it bleeds into the present, like walking up out of a cellar in the bright of noon. To be alive in Christ is to have more to your name than a smile and a shoeshine. It is for life itself to be our "rock bottom," in greater measure day by day, until the final shadow of death passes away, and all talk of graves with it. If it's all true, then we are not stalked by death but by life. We are stalked by life, even as we die.