NOTES for Mar 10:38
The apostles try to understand Christ by ordinary human logic. Their everyday notions have not yet been transfigured by the light they have recently begun to receive from the Teacher, and therefore they themselves "do not know what they are asking."
Many of us come to God in order to receive. And He gives us much, but we insatiably demand more and more, and in the end, as in the well-known fairy tale, we find ourselves by a broken trough.
Meanwhile, from the point of view of a successful environment, Christ Himself was left by a "broken trough" in Gethsemane and on Golgotha. To everyone who wants to be with Him, He offers a share in what in the eyes of those around Him is defeat and failure. But only so, through the cross, comes the Resurrection. By accepting at least a part of His self-emptying, only a tiny part, for Christ does not want us to shoulder what we cannot bear, one can receive the right to share with Him the joy of Triumph. And it is precisely into this joy that the One who came not "to be served, but to serve" wants to bring us.