"Jesus enters the city and goes through it. Zacchaeus runs in front of the crowd. Evidently he can't get through it. He climbs a sycamore tree in order to be able to see Jesus. Jesus looks up to Zacchaeus. Previously everyone has been looking down on him or overlooking him. For the first time Zacchaeus feels human. In the Hellenistic milieu anablepo means looking up to heaven and to disembodied ideas. Jesus looks up to a person. He sees heaven in people. He sees the face of God in people. That makes Zacchaeus a new man. He gets a new face. He discovers his face in the face of Jesus. And his face is filled with joy. Jesus calls him by his name. Zacchaeus quickly comes down. This little man who wanted to rise high and therefore got beyond himself, comes down. He becomes humble, one with the earth. There on level ground the miracle of his transformation takes place. The man Zacchaeus is transformed by the man Jesus, who wants to celebrate with him, eat and drink with him. In this man Jesus, Zacchaeus experiences God's salvation. The experience changes him. Jesus doesn't preach repentance but lets Zacchaeus experience his love, which accepts people unconditionally. The experience of this love leads the chief tax collector to repent. He spontaneously offers to give half his possessions to the poor and repay fourfold what he has collected unfairly. Because he knows that he has been accepted, because he has come into contact with his own dignity, he no longer needs the mechanism of standing out from the rest and accumulating money. Now he is free to give what he had clung on to. The repentance takes place out of the experience of loving care and joy that radiate from his face. Those who read this story get new faces, like Zacchaeus. They rejoice because today Jesus looks at them and calls them by name. Their faces, which previously had looked only in the mirror, open up, and they see people as they are. They notice them and become their brothers and sisters. Instead of calling for repentance, this marvelous story actually makes repentance take place. That is Luke's user-friendly theology. Luke can dispense with doing people down, constantly reminding them of their sinfulness. He tells of the loving kindness of Jesus who encounters people in such a way that they repent joyfully and in this way discover their own humanism, their own humanity and loving-kindness."