Isaiah 57:3–6

In these verses, the Lord, through Isaiah, dramatically summons the unfaithful remnant of Israel for judgment, exposing their practices of sorcery, ritual prostitution, and idol worship under sacred trees and in rocky ravines. The passage functions as a divine lawsuit (Hebrew: rîb), charging Israel with abandoning the living God for demons and stones. Far from being merely historical, these verses reveal the deep structure of sin as a turning away from God toward counterfeit ultimacies — a pattern the Catholic tradition sees as perpetually relevant.

Verse 3 — "Draw near here, you sons of a sorceress": The divine summons is sharp and ironic. God calls the wicked forward — not to receive a blessing, as Israel expected when drawing near to God in worship (cf. Lev 9:5), but to face an indictment. The phrase "sons of a sorceress" (Hebrew: bənê ʿōnenâ) — literally "children of a female diviner" — strips away any pretension of covenant lineage. To be a "son of Abraham" meant everything to the Israelite identity; here God substitutes that honorific with the lineage of witchcraft. The parallel phrase "offspring of the adulterer and the loose woman" (v. 3b, fuller text) reinforces that the people's spiritual parentage has been rewritten by their own infidelity. This is not merely metaphor: Deuteronomy 18:10–12 explicitly lists divination, sorcery, and consultation of spirits as abominations that caused the Canaanites to be dispossessed — Israel has become what it was called to displace.

Verse 4 — "Whom do you mock? Against whom do you open your mouth wide and stick out your tongue?": The rhetorical question is devastating. The Hebrew idiom of "opening wide the mouth" and "sticking out the tongue" (cf. Ps 22:7) denotes contemptuous mockery — the posture of the godless toward the righteous sufferer. God turns the gesture back on them: you mock the very prophets and faithful servants through whom God spoke; you mock the covenant itself. Isaiah here likely has in mind the scorn leveled at figures like Isaiah himself and, typologically, at the Servant of the Lord (52:13–53:12), who is despised and rejected. In Catholic reading, this verse anticipates the mockery of Christ at his Passion — the same gesture of contemptuous tongues and open mouths echoed in Psalm 22:13. The wicked do not merely sin in private; they perform their apostasy as theater, mocking the righteous.

Verse 5 — "You who inflame yourselves among the oaks, under every green tree": The verb translated "inflame" (Hebrew: ḥămiym, meaning to burn with heat or lust) refers to the frenzied, erotic character of Canaanite fertility rites practiced beneath sacred trees — the asherahs — long condemned in Israel (Deut 12:2; 1 Kgs 14:23; Jer 2:20). "Every green tree" is a stereotyped formula throughout the prophets for syncretistic, sexually charged worship. The people are "inflamed" — the same root used for sexual passion — which underscores that idolatry is not mere intellectual error but a disordered eros, a misplaced love that mimics worship but is finally self-consuming lust. The mention of "slaying the children in the valleys, under the clefts of the rocks" (v. 5c, fuller context) connects the fertility worship to child sacrifice — the logical terminus of a religion built on appetite rather than covenant love.

Catholic tradition reads this passage through several interlocking lenses that deepen its meaning considerably.

Idolatry as disordered love: St. Augustine's foundational insight in De Doctrina Christiana is that sin consists in using (uti) what should be enjoyed (frui) and enjoying what should only be used — treating creatures as ultimate ends. Isaiah 57 dramatizes this precisely: Israel has bestowed on rocks and trees the love, worship, and sacrifice owed to God alone. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2112–2114) defines idolatry as not only the worship of false gods but "whenever man honors and reveres a creature in place of God" — a warning the Church extends to money, power, and ideology.

Sorcery and the demonic: The Church Fathers, particularly Tertullian (De Spectaculis) and Origen (Contra Celsum), identified the gods behind pagan rites as demonic powers. St. Paul corroborates this: "What pagans sacrifice they offer to demons" (1 Cor 10:20). The CCC (§2116–2117) explicitly condemns all practices of magic and sorcery, noting that they "contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone." Isaiah's "sorceress" lineage points to a spiritual genealogy — those who traffic with dark powers are children of those powers.

The Suffering Servant as the Mocked Righteous: The Church Fathers (e.g., St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Isaiah) saw verse 4's mockery as prophetically fulfilled at the Passion. The derision of Israel's unfaithful toward God's messengers is the same spirit that cried "Crucify him." The typological arc runs from Isaiah's mocked prophets through the derided Servant to Christ crucified.

"Your portion": St. John of the Cross (Ascent of Mount Carmel I.4) warns that the soul attached to creatures — even good ones — is bound by them as surely as by chains. God's sardonic "your portion is smooth stones" is, in mystical terms, a description of the spiritually shrunken soul that has exchanged infinite joy for finite trinkets.

This passage confronts the contemporary Catholic with a discomfiting mirror. Modern Western culture does not typically sacrifice animals beneath oak trees, but the structure of idolatry Isaiah condemns is entirely familiar: the disordered "inflammation" (v. 5) of appetites — sexual, digital, consumerist — that promise transcendence but deliver only smooth stones in a ditch (v. 6). The Catholic reader is asked: What is my ḥēleq, my true "portion"? Psalm 16:5 answers: "The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup." Concretely, this passage calls us to examine where we pour our "drink offerings" — our time, attention, desire, and worship. The proliferating shrines of the digital age (the phone as "every green tree") demand the same honesty Isaiah demanded of Israel. The passage also cautions against the subtle sorcery of self-constructed spirituality — assembling a personal religion from cultural fragments while mocking orthodox faith. The divine summons of verse 3, "Draw near here," is ultimately an invitation: God still calls even the wayward to stand before him — not to be destroyed, but to be confronted, converted, and restored.