A third time he came, and said to them, “Sleep on now, and rest yourselves. Enough! My time has come. Look, the Son of Man is being betrayed into the hands of wicked people.
if at first
you don’t succeed
rinse and repeat
as necessary
to become clean enough
to say it clear
enough
time’s upof course
time’s been up
for quite some time
enough has been done
to finally move on
to doom’s midnight hour
a creaking door
to maybe a new garden
Bratcher451 notes, “How this [verse] is to be taken is subject to wide differences of opinion.” This page doesn’t scratch the surface of difficulties.
Returning to the same situation a third time, whether a statement is made to or a question asked about the sleeping disciples, significant irony is present.
It is out of this recognition of the state of affairs that we come to a form of a word only used here in the Christian Testament—ἀπέχει (apechei, sufficient, settled) that is translated as “enough”. Mann593 is accurate when he says, “The commentators provide us with a rich field of speculation with respect to this word….”
The tradition ties “enough” with sleep. However, the word itself has ties to a completed economic transaction and has been seen in relation to Judas having received his payment, solidifying a betrayal. E.K. Simpson’s paraphrase goes so far as to say, “It is settled! The deed of infamy is done! He pockets his reward.”
Apechei has also been recorded in some manuscripts with the word telos, which brings us back to Chapter 13 and the apocalyptic sense that things are now in place and can’t be changed—disaster all around.
The question of looking backward to sleep or forward to betrayal is one each Reader is going to have to wrestle with. Working against this is whatever traditional translation one is reading. In English, it doesn’t appear, on the surface, to be much of a question.
There is still the third-person use of “son of adam” that needs looking at and a deeper investigation into whatever moral and theological significance needs to be brought to bear on the determination of “sinners” (including sleeping disciples?).