René Girard, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
My first claim about the Cross was stark: it is not a sacrifice. For millennia sacrifice meant the community discharging its violence onto a victim to secure its own peace — the mechanism I had traced to the foundation of the world. To read the death of Christ as one more such transaction, a victim offered to satisfy an angry God, is to drag the Gospel back into the very mechanism it came to expose.
What happens at Golgotha is the opposite of sacrifice in that archaic sense: an innocent victim, killed by the unanimous crowd in the ordinary way, whose innocence is declared and whose killers are forgiven, so that the mechanism is shown for what it is and stripped of its sacred cover. God does not demand the victim; God is the victim, submitting to human violence in order to unveil it.
Later I granted that I had been too eager to purge the word 'sacrifice' entirely, and I accepted a second, transformed sense — the self-giving of one who refuses to pass violence on — because the New Testament will not let the word go and because self-donation and scapegoating, though opposite, had always been tangled in the single word. But the core holds: the Cross does not feed the mechanism. It breaks it.1234
At no point in the Gospels is the death of Jesus defined as a sacrifice. The passages that are invoked to justify a sacrificial conception of the Passion both can and should be interpreted with no reference to sacrifice in any of the accepted meanings. Certainly the Passion is presented to us in the Gospels as an act that brings salvation to humanitv. But it is in no way presented as a sacrifice.Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, pp. 192–193
I wanted something still more explicit, a sign. What troubled me most of all, with regard to the Passion of Christ, was Schwager's reliance on the term "sacrifice," which I had used earlier in reference to the rituals of archaic religion.The One by Whom Scandal Comes, p. 41
The founding mechanism that is exposed through Jesus' teachings and fate is misconstrued as the affirmation of the founding mechanism, i.e.. of scapegoating and sacrifice. However, modern ignorance of the mechanism is not simply the work of fundamentalists and others who hold to a sacrificial religion.The Girard Reader, pp. 141–142
It is obvious that bringing to light the founding murder completely rules out any compromise with the principle of sacrifice, or indeed with any conception of the death of Jesus as a sacrifice.Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, pp. 193–194
Girard's reading of the Passion is where mimetic theory becomes most directly a theology and where he most visibly changed his mind. The early, strictly anti-sacrificial position of Things Hidden was pressed hard by the theologian Raymund Schwager and others, and Girard revised: not abandoning the claim that Christ's death exposes rather than performs the archaic mechanism, but accepting a transformed, self-giving sense of 'sacrifice' that the New Testament language requires. Classical atonement theology objects that the Cross is a sacrifice in a strong sense — the Lamb of God, the once-for-all offering — and that Girard's reading dissolves the doctrine of redemption into an anthropological unveiling. Non-violent and liberation theologians, by contrast, embraced the anti-sacrificial reading as freeing the Gospel from a violent God. The revision is itself part of the position: Girard held his conclusions revisable under the pressure of the texts.