From the writings of René Girard (+2015)

Many of the scenes from Genesis and Exodus are apparently concerned, on the historical level, with a state of transition from a world in which human sacrifice was practised on a regular basis, particularly the sacrifice of the first-born, to a world in which the only legitimate blood rites are circumcision and the burning of animal victims (Jacob’s blessing, the sacrifice of Abraham, the circumcision of Moses’s son, and so on). There is no lack of texts to back up this hypothesis. From our standpoint its advantage is that it allows us to view the Bible permeated by a single, dynamic movement away from sacrifice. We can distinguish a number of very different stages — differing in their content and the results they produced — which are nonetheless identical in general bearing and form. This form always involves the preliminary disintegration of a pre-existing system, a catastrophic crisis that ends happily when the victimage mechanism provides a mediation, and the subsequent establishment of a sacrificial system that became more and more humane. The first stage is the transition from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice in the so-called patriarchal period; the second, in Exodus, is the institution of Passover, which accentuates the common meal rather than the burnt sacrifice and can hardly claim to be a sacrifice at all in the proper sense of the term. The third stage is represented by the prophets’ wish to renounce all forms of sacrifice, and this is only carried out in the Gospels. 

[Thus the] Eucharist is really related to sacrifice but instead of representing the violence against the victim, of being the victim that you eat, you eat the total refusal of violence, which is Christ. It’s a reversal, but it’s still the same symbolism. The anthropologists are right to point that out. It doesn’t mean it means the same thing, but what they see is that it is the same thing, so since they think that the killing is only symbolical anyway, they feel the Eucharist and sacrifice are pretty much the same thing. But it is not because the shedding of blood, the violence in sacrifice, is essential. It means the end of violence yet at the same time it shows the continuity with a whole history of religion, so when the anthropologists tell you “Hey, it’s cannibalism” you should answer “Yes, of course, cannibalism is part of human history and the Eucharist summarizes it all in non-violence.” Therefore, why not cannibalism there as well? Cannibalism is the essence of sacrifice. Cannibalism means that you eat the sacrificial victim in order to be your victim, because you want to be that victim. The reason you killed him is you want to be him/her. Therefore, if you absorb his/her flesh, you become them, just as if you absorb the flesh of Christ, you should become a little bit nonviolent, more than you were before. If you understand this text, you also perceive that people who want to fool us cannot have put it there. We can discover in these sayings tremendous aspects that no one has yet discovered that fit the Christian meaning. Like the stone that the builders rejected. So therefore faith is highly linked to the text; that must be something a little bit Protestant in me. It is Christ himself who takes assumes the responsibility of quoting that psalm (118:22), saying “explain it to me, explain the relationship with me.” We haven’t deciphered it yet. It should be enough for everybody to understand that Christianity is not a text like others where part of its truth is still hidden but decipherable. This is the sort of thing that can restore the damaged faith of our time.