Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 6:7

"And in praying use not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking." — Matthew 6:7 (ASV)

Use not vain repetitions — The Greek word has a force that is only weakly conveyed in the English translation. The term is formed from a word that imitates the repeated attempts of a stammerer to express his thoughts, so it could almost be translated as, “Do not stutter out your prayers; do not babble them over.” These words describe all too well the act of prayer when it becomes mechanical.

The devotion of the rosary, in which every bead is connected with a Pater Noster or an Ave Maria, simply reproduces the eighteen prayers of the Rabbis, which they considered an act of religion to repeat.

On the other hand, it is clear that the law of Christ does not forbid the repetition that comes from intense emotion. That is not a “vain repetition.” In the great crisis of His human life, our Lord Himself prayed three times, using the same words (Matthew 26:44).

How far our use of the Lord’s Prayer, or of the Kyrie Eleison in our Litanies, is open to the charge of “vain repetition” is another question. It is obvious that it may easily become so for any mechanical worshiper of the Pharisaic type. But on the other side, there is an ever-accumulating weight of evidence from truly devout souls that they have found it helpful in sustaining the emotion without which prayer is dead.

As the heathen do — We know too little about the details of the ritual of classical paganism to say how far the charge of vain repetition applied to them at this time. The cries of the worshipers of Baal from morning even until noon (1 Kings 18:26) and the shouts of those of Artemis at Ephesus for the space of two hours (Acts 19:34) may be taken as representative examples.

Their much speaking — This thought was the root evil of the worship of the pagan or the Pharisee. It gave prayer a quantitative, mechanical force that was believed to increase in proportion to the number of prayers offered. If fifty failed, a hundred might succeed. But this assumed that the purpose of prayer was to change the will of God or to inform Him of what He did not already know. Our Lord teaches us—as all masters of the spiritual life have taught—that this assumption immediately undermines prayer.