Hmm. I am a Jew, but when we pray, we sometimes say “God remembered…”, And that does mean that God did something. He kept his covenant, protected the nation, gave Sara a child… God did something substantial. I am hardly a Greek scholar, but I doubt that phrase just means that Jesus will think about the criminal, I think it means Jesus intends to help him in some way.
I think it makes a lot of sense that, when praying, instances of God actively doing something are referred to. After all, those are the, for lack of a better word, useful times. For the same reason, I wouldn’t be shocked if those who pray refer to not just God, but to the noble or otherwise good qualities of God; those are the details that make them worth praising. Specifying in prayers particular instances, or particular qualities, of God, doesn’t strike me as necessarily a good standard by which his entire (Biblically-defined) existence could be judged. How many people pray to God referring to the murder of the Egyptian firstborn? And yet, that was done.
I don’t see that examples of God remembering = God then doing things because of that memory is something that can be generalised so strongly to any instances of deitic remembrance. I mean, for starters, it’s an inaccurate word for the situation, anyway, if we’re talking about an omniscient God (though this also seems to separate God and Jesus on this particular metric, depending on your view, of course). Not to mention that your suggestion is fairly easily dealt with just by saying that Jesus *did *intend to help out the criminal; by remembering him, as he’d asked.