Steps to the cross. . .

O. P. Kretzmann was the face of Valparaiso University -- at least for folks of my generation and older.  His was a personality and stature to be reckoned with and he used his gifts well in service to the Lord and to His Church.  But like all heroic figures, memory fades.  Sometimes during Holy Week I like to pull out old volumes of Lenten and Holy Week devotions and this one from OP is called The Road of Memory...

[Jesus] carried this tenderness with Him even to the cross.  Here He was engaged in the last conflict in behalf of the souls of men.  Here He was bringing into final harmony the three greatest facts of life -- the love of God, the power of the Law, and the deadliness of sin...

We hear on the cross His last conversation with one of those who passed Him as a shadow in the night.  The dying thief on the cross to the right speaks: "Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy kingdom."  The answer comes, transforming darkness into light, hell into heaven, and sweeping into eternity a human soul for whom hope had failed and for whom death meant only darkness:  "Today shalt thou be with Me in Paradise."  The Road Back to God had become for him the road of blessed and eternal memory.

Lord, remember me... it was a chance that faith always takes.  He was asking Jesus to remember not his sins or his past, or the fever-stricken years, but him, his own immortal and Christ-redeemed soul... Four hundred years earlier Nehemiah had closed a book in the Old Testament with the moving words: "Remember me, O my God, for good..."

There is a very old legend... that this was not the first time that our Lord and the robber had met.  Thirty-two years earlier when the Holy Family had fled from the wrath of Herod they had gone from Jerusalem to Jericho by the famous Bloody Way.  This was the road which has become so familiar to us from the Parable of the Good Samaritan... Here as night fell Joseph and Mary and the Baby Jesus found refuge among the robbers' caves.  A robber's wife saw the infant Christ in His mother's arms, rushed forward crying and pointing to her own child wasting away on a pile of sheepskins in a corner of the cave.  While the two mothers were talking the infant Christ stretched out His hand toward the dying baby in the corner.  Instantly health came back to that little twisted body.  The cheeks grew rosy once more and the happy mother clasped her child to her heart in gratitude and wonder.  Thirty-two years later the two children met again.  Now they were two young men hanging on two cross beyond the gates of Jerusalem...

[Though not true in fact, is it not true in life?]  The Road Back to God is a strange blend of forgetting and remembering... The first word, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" shows us the eternal Son of God pleading with His Father to forget.  [Another word speaks of the blessed and beautiful memory of God who] never forgets.  His memory is eternal.  A long time ago His voice came to the dying thief:  "Today shalt thou be with Me in Paradise."  Today it comes to our sin-burdened and sin-laden souls with the same strength and the same power [the God who can never forget His love for us.]

Oh, yes.  Lord... what He chooses to forget and what He insists upon remembering are what the Gospel is, why this week is holy, and why we walk the steps to the cross every year...  Thank you, OP, for reminding me...